Be gay, select pronouns, and devour the world for 1.2k more copper plate production per minute.

Why would Krasnov end the tariff war that’s proving so effective against his master’s enemies?

No, that’s basically it.

The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn’t backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can’t trust the other computers that you’re talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can’t suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.

It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it’s worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it’s supposed to replace.

So it’s just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that’s supposedly worth something because…of reasons?

I think it helps to reinforce how silly crypto is, though. Once you establish that fiat currency is basically magic paper we all agree is worth something because it’s backed by things like the government’s reliability and contract to uphold that value, and then you say, “and crypto, designed to replace fiat currency, is backed by fiat currency,” the whole thing falls apart like the house of cards that it is.

How can you justify a funny money that doesn’t do anything new in terms of cyber security, while burning vastly more resources to do it, and is only worth something because of the currency that it’s supposed to replace, and that value rapidly fluctuates from moment to moment.

I highly recommend watching The Worst Guide To Factorio, which is where that quote came from. Gives a great overview of the game with awesome lines like that.

Some other great ones include:

Do you have a STEM degree or similar mental affliction?

Using this very average German, we need to build an automation factory, and to do this, we’re going to become more obsessed with belts than an anime protagonist so that we can accomplish more insertions than a sounding enthusiast.

It was never about winning, it’s about sending a message. This planet is alive, and I’m going to teach it fear. And in order to do that, we’re going to be expanding harder than a furry artist trying to make rent.

Hope you started this several hours ago, because now it’s time for the Kovarex enrichment process. … Fun fact: It’s named after the game’s lead developer and works by exposing the uranium 238 to the radioactive yikes that is his Reddit posts.

Scale up our circuit production to an absurd degree and consume them like they’re Doritos. Size does matter and anyone who tells you otherwise is a bottom, and I’m always on top of my game.

And probably my favorite:

Finally, I have to address a bit of an elephant in the room. The lead developer of this game kind of sucks. I truly hope they’ve had a redemption arc since their controversy but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending this game without acknowledging it. So to balance the scales I’ve done what any reasonable person would do in this situation. I learned LUA out of spite and made a mod that lets you be gay and select pronouns.

Counterpoint

This planet is unprocessed, and I will be the one to refine it. The Factory Must Grow.

An article from just after Jan 6th happened. My phone says I saved it on Jan 8th, 2021, so it was literally a day or two after.

It’s a delaying tactic. If the government shuts down, nothing can move forward. They can’t fire people and continue destroying offices because those employees all get paid through the shutdown but nobody can do any work. Any of the paperwork involved - pink slips, etc. can’t go through because there’s nobody there to send them or even read the emails.

If a shutdown helped the Republicans, then that’s what they would’ve been going for in the first place.

Every extra day it takes them is a day where things haven’t gotten worse for everyone and an extra day for the already fracturing Krasnov administration to continue to fall apart and eat itself.

The best evidence of this is the creator of Tumblr. He sold it and got a payout of like a hundred million dollars or something and completely disappeared from public life. He only ever appears in the news when he makes some big donation to a charity.

In short, AI is useful when it’s improving workflow efficiency and not much else beyond that. People just unfortunately see it as a replacement for the worker entirely.

If you wanna get loose with your definition of “AI,” you can go all the way back to the MS Paint magic wand tool for art. It’s simply an algorithm for identifying pixels within a certain color tolerance of each other.

The issue has never been the tool itself, just the way that it’s made and/or how companies intend to use it.

Companies want to replace their entire software division, senior engineers included, with ChatGPT or equivalent because it’s cheaper, and they don’t value the skill of their employees at all. They don’t care how often it’s wrong, or how much more work the people that they didn’t replace have to do to fix what the AI breaks, so long as it’s “good enough.”

It’s the same in art. By the time somebody is working as an artist, they’re essentially at a senior software engineer level of technical knowledge and experience. But society doesn’t value that skill at all, and has tried to replace it with what is essentially a coding tool trained on code sourced from pirated software and sold on the cheap. A new market of cheap knockoffs on demand.

There’s a great story I heard from somebody who works at a movie studio where they tried hiring AI prompters for their art department. At first, things were great. The senior artist could ask the team for concept art of a forest, and the prompters would come back the next day with 15 different pictures of forests while your regular artists might have that many at the end of the week. However, if you said, “I like this one, but give me some versions without the people in them,” they’d come back the next day with 15 new pictures of forests, but not the original without the people. They simply could not iterate, only generate new images. They didn’t have any of the technical knowledge required to do the job because they depended completely on the AI to do it for them. Needless to say, the studio has put a ban on hiring AI prompters.

• This is likely the first major outage of the company since Musk took ownership in 2022.

Didn’t Twitter go down multiple times for similar periods of time not long after Musk fired everybody? Or am I just hallucinating wishful thinking.

Plug that random USB stick you found on the sidewalk directly into the server and open up Link_ParkFullAlbum-LimeWire.exe

I don’t know the 5 9s reference, but the two 8s is 88, a Nazi dog whistle for Heil Hitler, as H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

The point that they’re making is that it’s a never-ending process to be aware of and guard against, and those who think that they’ve accomplished being “not racist” are often people who actively are racist and don’t see it. Think the liberal speaking over people about their own wants and needs.

I’m Back by Dope.

To quote a chopped up recording of JFK from a song: “Trusting in the sanity and restraint of the United States is not an option. Go home and die.”

Plenty of red outside the cities, though, and if they figure out why they’re suddenly paying more for electricity, it may change a few minds about Republicans.

Of course, they’re more likely to just blame Democrats for it, but one can hope.

This is why I’ve always maintained the distinction between conservatives and Republicans. Not all conservatives are Republicans, but all Republicans are toe the party line goose steppers. And there can be no compromise with fascists or white supremacists.

As my grandfather and first boss both would say when you asked them who they were voting for, “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.” Doesn’t matter if it’s Reagan, Stalin, Hitler, or Karl Marx risen from the grave to destroy the spectre of capitalism once and for all, so long as they have an R beside their name, that’s all that matters.

There was somebody crazy enough to make an entire game in Blender, I don’t doubt that somebody has at least tried to make a soundtrack in Blender.