If it bursts we’ll get a lot of data centers looking for something to do. And RAM prices will come down but … What’s causing the bottle neck right now is that your average RAM factory needs a couple of years from designed to built to working. So the supply is limited right now while the demand is high. While us end users can’t use the data center gear, in a pinch they could use ours. So the bottle neck gets tighter. So if the bubble collapses, supply will increase and that will bring prices down. If it bursts about two years from now, all the hastily built RAM factories will churn out cheap RAM. But none of this is guaranteed, not the busting and not the dead cheap prices. Because the demand for RAM will not drop off a cliff, it will most likely decrease slowly. All this processing power in post-burst idle data centers will find a way to be used - with what I do not know. There will still be a higher demand for RAM compared to pre-ChatGPT times. So RAM will not flood the market, we will just return to a relative equilibrium of the market.

Shit, I had hoped reaching out to his next of kin might be a good avenue to pursue. Causally chat with your neighbours, even the fully detached ones. Awkward, I know. But the guy is bound to have pissed them off on occasion as well. At the very least you’ll know you’re not alone in this. At best they could all call and complain on occasion. Naturally.

You are sure he’s mentally handicapped, right? I’m sure your council has been austeritied to the brink of non-functinality thanks to the delight that is UK politics of the last 20 years. I wonder if there is a charity organisation in your area that sort of stepped in, out of necessity. A mental health fire service/outreach of sorts. Even if they cannot help you with your case directly, they may know of more resources to deal with a person like that, seemingly self reliant but with episodes and delusions.

There are always cases that fall through the cracks. Not mad enough to be institutionalised, not well enough to live alone. He’s also too old to go to prison really and your best case scenario is to get him admitted somewhere.

Definitely have a chat with your mother about feeding the foxes. Try to sell it to her as a test. We’re going to test for x months if fewer animal noises lead to fewer weird shit coming from our neighbour.

Get him a ten pound Christmas gift and write him a card that’s 90 percent merry this and that and best wishes for the new year. And 10 percent if it’s possible please keep the volume of anything on a loudspeaker down, thank you for your cooperation. No threats, kill him with kindness. Leave it at his door. (Log that as well and keep a picture of text on the card.)

I imagine describing the mood between you and him as tense might be a bit of an understatement. Giving him fewer reasons to fear the family of werewolves next door might cause him to be less delusional? This is a last resort strategy but builds on the kill him with kindness idea. Get his bins in, offer to mow his lawn, that sort of thing. Slowly involve your brother.

I don’t think this is right-wing specific. You could probably draw similar conclusions coming from an Islamist angle. And this so-called AI is going to be next “frontier” is not all that clear to me yet. It’s a nebulous threat at this stage that starts with a lot of “imagine if” arguments. We don’t know yet. It’s worth paying attention. But we don’t know if HitLLMer chatbots are going to cause more damage than the concentration camp simulation games that preceded them.

There is a good 15% of people who are drank the koolaid right-wing believers. I don’t think that number has changed much in the last century. The number that changes is how many of the less extreme or undecided people in the middle they can convince they’re right.

The internet is only as regulated as the least regulating country on this planet. So all it takes is a tiny island nation or a principality left over in time to break the chain. It’s also conceivable (imagine if!) that a fine, upstanding citizen like Elon Musk uses the change he found in his couch cushions to circumvent any regulatory efforts anywhere to distribute otherwise regulated content via his private satellite network. The answer cannot be “let’s limit speech more.” The answer must be “fight back with truth and facts.” If asshole ideologists use all the digital tools available to spread their bullshit, we need to fund initiatives that counter that speech with the same tools.

Did you call the police when he sounded the siren at night? Like 999? From what I read here there is enough there to get him cited if not arrested.

You need to keep a paper log of every incident. Keep it factual, just answering the w questions, no “dickhead was a dickhead again”, just “Mr Smith turned on his radio at very loud volume at 6:30am on 6th December.” “I asked Mr Smith about the loud noise on 6th December at 6:30am when I saw him outside in his driveway at 9:23am. He told me he did it on purpose.”

I would call 999 for every noise complaint in the night and every threatening remark made against your brother at any time. You need a stronger paper trail for people to do something. You’ve complained to your council and you’ve talked to the police. It seems that wasn’t enough.

Don’t retaliate with loud music or deliberate harassment yourself. It might be hard not to. But you need to be spotless victims. You don’t want a ‘let’s look at both sides’ to give the impression you provoked anything at any time.

How is the third semi detached party feeling about this old guy? They must feel some of the nuisance? Surely they could corroborate that your brother isn’t doing werewolf things at night? See if you could get them to write letters or call the police as well. The more neighbours join in, the better (but don’t start a poster campaign, it should look “natural”).

Is there something that can be done to stop foxes from coming into the gardens? If they are the “werewolves” here then this could be a way to root out that delusion.

Does the old guy have family? Is there a way to reach out to them? Not in “reign in your fucking dickhead father!” but “we are really worried about your father’s mental state because he keeps making outlandish and unsubstantiated statements.”

Can you google if there is a solicitor in your area that will maybe hear your case for no or a low fee to see if you can take this to court? Either the old dickhead or the council for not doing anything about him? That’s where the paper log might be useful.

The only word of warning I would leave here is this: you said you’re all not at your best. Taking legal action will be additionally stressful and will cost money and time. Another thing that would cost money and time is selling the house and moving somewhere else. In the interest of your mental health, you should probably discuss this first, which path to follow. And although it is cynical, you also need to factor in that this problem will resolve itself naturally, probably within the next decade.

Neighbourhood disputes are not great. Your home should be your castle and somebody is shooting cannonballs at it. I’ve seen one case in my parent’s friend group that started with a fence encroaching on the other property, more than a decade of lawyers going back and forth, accusations of tyres being slashed, police calls for any minor infraction. This can consume people. Don’t get consumed.

Is this a bad use of so-called AI? Yes. Is this illegal? I’m going to say no. One of the reasons why Google tried this is because in various markets they’ve been dragged to court or coerced to fund news initiatives because they used snippets from publishers in their search results word-for-word. A not insignificant number of publishers has been lobbying pretty hard against them for giving you their headline and a couple of phrases as a snippet. Those publishers are dumb if you ask me but they were able to bend laws to their will and limit the usefulness of the link, the cornerstone of the internet. So you can sort of understand their motivation why they would try this. And it was only a test from what I’ve heard. So bash Google for all the truly evil shit they’re up to. This issue is dumb but not really worth the outrage.

The thought behind the post is worthwhile to ponder and discuss.

Personally, I don’t think it’s as dire as the text makes it seem. The speculation that a steadfast refusal of showing text only on PF might lead the AP protocol guardians to include a dummy pic in every post seems to me to be in the “possible but outlandish” category.

If the premise of AP was that every user should be able to see everything everywhere then defederating from certain instances shouldn’t be possible. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

The tree of the fediverse is big and nobody needs to saw off any branches. A picture only branch can sit next to a hypothetical text only one. I can see an argument that newbies to those particular branches could be more explicitly made aware of the filtering they will experience. While I was reading the text about the users who thought they saw everything from Mastodon on PF, my first thought was: this strains credulity. But then again, users are dumb. I hadn’t realized for a while that shared posts don’t show up in my PF feed on the app either.

I don’t think anybody could become too big for their breeches on the fediverse because the fediverse is in no position to challenge the incumbent corporate platforms. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here and on Mastodon (and on PF). But if you come from those polished centrally organized platforms and you’re not willing to invest at least a little bit of time into learning how federating works (also refer to users are dumb above), you’ll already be disappointed and put off before you realize you now need to also become your own algorithm. The threat scenario that PF could become so big that it can dictate protocol also presupposes that AP is the protocol that will endure forever. And with AT it already has a competitor waiting in the wings. As I said up top, the thought about how one dominating branch could damage the whole tree is worthwhile. But in a dramatic shift from this metaphor: we are in no position to have to cross this bridge any time soon.

Another reason why PF won’t be getting out the chainsaw is its usability. It’s only great for looking at pictures. It’s terrible for having discussions about them unless you only use the website. I’m using the Android app and it’s not great. Features came and went. The UI leaves a lot to be desired for me. It currently feels a bit abandoned because Dansup is more preoccupied with challenging TikTok. I still like PF because I go there just to look at pictures. I go to Mastodon for memes and dry remarks. And I don’t feel like I’m breaking the protocol.

This image may be a bit wonky but convenience stores don’t go out of business just because 24h supercenters exist. They both exchange ice cream for money but one of them has a bigger selection of flavors. PF is 7/11, Mastodon is Walmart.

Yes, the introduction of an individual, ethical “veto” came after the formation of national militaries like we know them today. There is built in tension to introduce a right to disobey into a system that otherwise demands obedience to function. It’s also hard to grasp as a concept even for the better educated. It’s fucked up. These days I’m thinking more and more about the adage that morale is something you need to be able to afford. And I understand every sergeant who feels like they don’t have any morale money to spend when ordered, say, to fire on shipwrecked drug smugglers. You piss off your boss and before you know it you’re dishonorably discharged back to the poverty stricken area you tried to get away from. Also, left-leaning liberals are a minority in a profession that practices how to kill people. There is so much gray there.

I say I understand the hypothetical sergeant in their moral life dilemma. As far as my respect is concerned, I can be totally black and white about this though.

The pessimistic take is none of this will matter because the US is moving further away from its constitutional order into a 21st century version of fascism. The military will be ridden of the morale “veto” and sworn to obey the leader no matter what. The optimistic take sees the current cult/fascistoid leadership edged out in 3-7 years and we will mostly see the homeopathic punishment I mentioned before. If we’re lucky, a tightening of the rules under which circumstances and with whose authority military units of any kind can be mobilized in peacetime within the US.

These names tend to be attached to them after the fact. I imagine there were a few Leonardos or Johannesses roaming about at their time so much like Alexander became The Great to set him apart from all other Alexanders, these names are scribes’ and historians’ shorthand to make clear which Leo or Joe you were talking about. And a few centuries of historical telephone later they seem to fit perfectly in our first name/last name system. Which in western Europe really only became officially standardized with the Code Civil from our friend Napoleon.

Or where they were from: da Vinci, Gutenberg. The Bible also doesn’t have a lot of action in China where last names were a thing before Jesus.

Soldiers have the right and the duty to resist illegal orders. I reserve respect for those who abide by that. Blind respect leads to blind eyes to when they eff up. And this American blind respect for active service members is so paradoxical in the face of how most veterans get treated.

The US military has survived the hot phase of the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And it probably should have taken more damage as an institution after each of these. It will survive 47 as well. Long drawn out procedures will meter out homeopathic doses of wrist slaps for most involved minus a handful of high profile scapegoats.

[Icey breath] No.

You can take your gaslight and shove it up your Baader-Meinhof-Effect!

Somebody took shots from the air of her home. She tried to get them removed from the public sphere. That caused headlines and as a result more people saw them attached to these news stories than ever would have if she hadn’t made an issue out of it.

Didn’t google, didn’t read the other comments.

I can see dead people.

I don’t think it would be weird. It’s up to them if they accept or not. I would just suggest you make parallel plans as well to meet new people. A hobby group, a book club, etc.

I think there are two general (human) media preferences at work: “if it bleeds, it ledes” superceded by which deaths are more extraordinary. So soldiers murdered in peacetime is noteworthy. They could’ve become accountants but chose a career where there is a real and high risk of death. Btw I fear it’s that death math that made medical professionals drop out of noteworthiness post-pandy, i.e. the threat is real but the risk has gone down again. I think children dying generally of tragic circumstances will be noteworthy. Nurses contracting AIDS or non-famous people dying of natural causes become less noteworthy. And I use noteworthy here as what they chose to cover in their newsrooms. They have financial interests to consider as well, which brings us back to “if it bleeds.”

The American filter generally erases many “mundane” gun deaths from visibility. Either people are so numb it doesn’t register as the tragedy that it is or it doesn’t get covered. There are plenty of places on earth where a single gunshot fired in anger that would make headlines.

There is a worldwide blindness to traffic deaths. We have just accepted that this is how many people die. So if something more interesting happens elsewhere, the t-boned accountant on the way to Walmart just gets dropped.

So there are a number of factors that influence what makes the news or not. The list goes on.

I would also say that media coverage is not prescriptive for who you should feel empathy for. We cannot all feel all the tragedies on this planet at once. We’d go mad. You pick and choose as a defense mechanism. So if you don’t feel that much empathy for these national guardsmen, I kind of get it. If you don’t like how much media coverage it’s getting, I can definitely understand that. The problem is just that when you say this out loud you open yourself up to criticism, like: you don’t feel for the people who died while sworn to defend your freedom! What about children and nurses? That’s just whataboutism! Etc. So I would suggest you follow your own heart and change your media consumption when it bothers you. Or you’ll end up in a culture war debate about whose lives matter more.

You don’t show him the stupidity of his ways by sleeping with that lady. You either find a way to confront him about that. Or you unattach yourself from this toxic person by finding other, better friends. Frankly, I would give him a piece of my mind and then find other friends anyway.

I see your point. I was thinking about fining just the assholes who obstruct sidewalks beyond the tolerated minimum. I think there is a middle way to make that work and maybe even turn a profit. But that’s not a great additional argument from me. It might need a federal regulation change. They could introduce a hefty fine for parking in such a manner that a wheelchair user could not safely use the sidewalk as a result. One can dream.

I don’t follow your relaxed law logic. The law was not enforced before and would be more tightly enforced under this plan.

I would argue the space on the sidewalk has already been reduced and this plan would just limit punishment to those who truly deserve it. And if this is policy it should include the staff hours for parking inspectors. They could take note of areas where sidewalk parking often reduces space to below 1.6m and then have bollards or other barriers installed in these hotspots.

And, as I’ve also already mentioned, there should be more policies to encourage giving up on car ownership. I suggested free public transport for former car owners. New developments should include the need to build its own parking faculties on the property. Parking fees should be raised slowly but steadily. Resident parking only schemes could maybe push visitors to the area into public transport. There are more tools in that toolbox.

BTW I’m not a fan of this plan. My sense of what is possible, i.e. politics, just forces me to grudgingly accept this as a compromise. If you reduce the space for parking, say, by planting trees or other physical obstacles (which will probably cost more than this), you’ll be voted out. Politicians are more pragmatists than idealists. Nobody will stay in office long with radical anti car policies - as much as I would personally support that.

In the context of small Munich alleys where space is scarce, where exactly should they build additional bicycle lanes that can be used by fire trucks? The shining examples of fuck cars infrastructure like Amsterdam and Copenhagen tend to be on flat land or the great infrastructure doesn’t actually extend into the narrow capillary alleys that have been around since the middle ages. They also took decades to implement policies in increments to get to where they are. Munich is in my estimation probably at least a decade behind that.

I don’t think I’m leaning too far out this window when I say: no, there isn’t an optimal size. It depends on so many factors. How many people? Is this urban or rural? What’s there neighborhood like? Facilities, public transport, doctors, grocery stores, etc.? What’s the crime rate like? How long is the commute to work? People have different priorities and make different choices as a result.