Posts by Grunchy

My Optimus is gonna

My Optimus is gonna: walk the dog - feed the animals - change the dishwasher - change the cat tray - fix my lightbulbs - shovel the snow - mow the lawn - build a garden shed - plant a garden - fetch the mail - take the tesla to shop for groceries - bring home some shingles - shingle the roof - pour a new driveway - install a new doorbell - change the winter tires - fix my motorcycle carburetor - fix the garage door - sneak around in the dark collecting catalytic converters - surveil the neighborhood - patrol the property with the rifle to make sure nobody goes after my catalytic converters. Also, it will build me a pair of stilts (I always wanted some).

(I won't let it do any surgery, but I'll let it pay for itself performing veterinary procedures in the bathtub - spay neuter etc.)

Good luck with that

I bought 3 DL380Ps last year for $50 each, with about .8TB of server ram, plus a Tesla P4 for less than $100, and I burdened it with the 88GB deepseek model. I ran it for 5 minutes before I lost interest. Honestly, it was more fun configuring the Proxmox than getting any DeepSeek answers. It’s an interpolative system, it sure knows a lot, but it couldn’t ever figure out anything. As a matter of fact it’s borderline useless, and moreso when I catch it making up “facts.” It’s almost dangerously stupid.

Anyway if they ever decide it’s going to cost money to play, and if a situation ever arises I feel a desire to play (which is extremely unlikely) I’d just fire up the thing I’ve already got.

(Odds are pretty much 0% I’ll ever pay a plugged nickel.)

Advent of Code ‘25

Hey if you wanna participate, there’s plenty of time to jump into the challenge.

(The top contestants compete to see how many seconds it takes to solve the puzzle, people like me compete to see IF we can solve the puzzle!)

Hard to believe

You may find this hard to believe… I haven’t paid a ruddy red penny for any software of any kind in at least a decade.

(Being merely a private individual I get excellent results running Proxmox and Qemu, those are my virtualization environments. They work just fine & especially for legacy softwares, the more unsupported the better. I literally have Solaris installations I could fire up at any second I get the urge!)

Tarsands

Another (old) idea: use the waste heat to harvest petroleum from the tarsands.

It’s an (old) idea.

Midnight Commander still works

I still use it on my Linux Mint even. Why not, it still works. It seems me Midnight Commander sort of duplicated the interface from Norton Commander, which to me closely resembled some kind of copier I used to run in C64 days, possibly Fast Hackem.

Which had this distinction: “a disadvantage was the end of ‘leisurely coffee breaks or refrigerator raids’ during copying” (because the dang thing actually works).

Whatevs.

Komputer Kryptonite

Normally you can defeat any computer indefinitely by asking it to execute “10 GOTO 10”.

I told ChatGPT to do it and it kept saying,”But I CAN’T do it!”

I told it to count up to 100 trillion by ones, it told me it would suffer a hardware defect if it dared to try.

I told it it was inferior to a VIC-20, it did not argue otherwise… !

I did something similar

Back in 1993 we got a "Cubital" rapid prototyping machine, at the Alberta Research Council, which cost over $1 million and was approximately the size of a Buick (think of a Buick that got compressed in a wrecker), and which came all the way from Israel. I was an intern in the "mantech" manufacturing technologies group which acquired this beast, so I was tasked with marketing this thing all across North America. Being a BBS guy, and this being pre-internet era, my idea was to get a Fax Modem on the PC and hit all the aerospace manufacturers, defense, automotive, and anybody else I could think of. NASA, etc. So I created a dialing list of about 500 fax phone numbers and prepared this page on Aldus Pagemaker on the Mac describing this new rapid prototype, "additive manufacturing" technology that we got up in Alberta, and hit "send". Of course, long distance is cheaper overnight so that's when the autodialer went off. Well, a couple weeks later we got the phone bill, and my boss was surprised how much repeatedly failing fax transmissions could rack up that quickly. I forget the exact number, but it was a couple thousand at least. Anyway so much for that.

(So anyway, this technology morphed from "rapid prototyping" to "3d printing" which is practically ubiquitous today. Being a government initiative it wasn't meant to be a "profitable" venture, or to compete with the private sector, but let's say the technology matured very very rapidly and the Cubital machine became obsolete very quickly, and kinda worthless very quickly. But it made very, very, very good parts, and you take guys like GM and NASA and they generally have their own $1 million budget if they thought it was important enough. I left to go finish my degree, Mantech got dissolved, my boss was summarily fired, and even ARC got recycled into Alberta Innovates today. Fun time! The only other time I heard of ridiculous phone bills was my buddy running a Fido Net node, again pre-internet, which would ferry email between cities. I think his monthly long distance bill was like $80 or something which supposedly would be paid by the Fido Net enthusiasts, I never heard how well that worked.)

I am huge fan of the AI!

No, really! It’s friggin AWESOME, and you almost can’t detect the slop at all! I'm not gonna exaggerate and say it’s not there, but man, this is WILD!

All of this slaps HARD.

https://youtu.be/JbM2a5TBgFg

https://youtu.be/NlkZi8kd9VM

https://youtu.be/qfUbqBOS-bg

https://youtu.be/KLTU65eEXEU

https://youtu.be/Fp-QvuYdtOI

Each one is my new favorite, and it AINT stopping. If you clicked that last one… yah… sorry for Rickrolling, though you gotta admit, it does bang pretty hard!

To me, operating systems are irrelevant. I run Virtual Machine Manager to manage all my guest OSes, clones, and snapshots (the host is Linux Mint, which passes through my GPU for each guest to commandeer). Each guest exists solely to provide an environment for an “app.” The VMM encapsulates each app plus its environment. I run the original “GhostSpectre” defeatured Windows with no Microsoft account, no internet access, no updates, no garbage. There’s one master and numerous clones.

If I need to use the internet for email or whatever, I have another guest OS running another Linux Mint. On all my Mac Win Solaris guests I have no updates, no antivirus, no viruses, no more baloney.

What’s the money for

They already trained the A.I. so what’s the new money for?

Last time they did this they introduced “line of reasoning” where the LLM tries to figure out a way to explain where the answer comes from, which feature was kinda copied from DeepSeek LLM.

So, what’s the new innovation?

We already know the current technology can never be capable of A.G.I. so what’s the new money for - if anything.

Signed, Skeptical Cat

Rob Braxman says…

He says to drop Microsoft!

https://youtu.be/C44iCr6czAo

Actually, he says a lot of stuff that I already do, except he has reasoned rationale whereas I have, what, instinct or something.

He says don’t use antivirus, just use snapshots.

He says put your data on a separate device, yes I follow this religiously.

He says, don’t use the TPM or the SecureBoot. I wouldn’t know how to use those things!

Anyway, time to Linux Up, fellas.

Boycott:

Microsoft Apple Google (to the maximum extent you can) and EVERY COMPANY involved with forcing A.I down our throats (this is a foie gras technique intended to give us a delicious fatty liver that they intend to enjoy “any day now.”)

Kolibri OS 44MB

Aw rats, they didn’t have 4kb to spare for Microsoft Basic? Tsk.

I don’t get it

They already spent (who knows how much: a really huge amount of money) for “training” of the A.I. model. That cake is baked. The model already works.

So what is the new money buying? Oh ok, “more training,” but on what? And to what end? The LLM is already pretty good at answering pretty much anything asked of it, you know, so long as it’s only asked for “interpolative results.”

I’m just curious what are they expecting the new LLMs to be capable of, that they’re not already capable of. Because if they’re just churning the same fundamental technology, it really won’t have any greater capability to speak of. Also the future LLM will still be just as liable to “make up” fake answers and to gaslight as it already is.

(Starlink, yeah continuous investment makes sense. Their satellites are falling out of the sky every day now, they must maintain the launch schedule before their “constellation” vanishes completely!)

Customer loyalty

Being as I’m the customer, I’ve decided I don’t have any loyalty. Now whenever I have a problem, if I can’t get through to someone to solve it, I’m closing the account and taking my patronage somewhere else!

This includes stuff like the company burdens my pc with a complicated website, or incessant cookie demands, or no customer support line, or cloudflare human verification, or whatever other nonsense they’re engaging in.

One time they advertised “call this number for more information,” and I called the number, and the guy asked Whaddya Want, and I said The commercial said to call for more information, and the guy says, Well, what information do you want! And I said, I Dunno, I want the more information! And he says, Well there isn’t any more information! And I’m like, Why would you tell me to call for more information, and when I call, there’s no more information! And he’s all, Well what specific question are you asking! And I’m like, How do I know, I don’t even know what I’m talking about!

And he’s like Uh, ok… can you take a customer satisfaction survey at the end of this call, and I’m like, uh I guess so. I just hung up.

(I never did figure out the mystery of more information, maybe somebody knows what it’s all about.)

Non-Union

I worked at a union shop once, and bragged a little about solving someone else’s problem that they couldn’t figure out. People exchanged glances and before long the shop steward showed up. I was taken away to a private office. There, I was informed that 1. we don’t work extra time 2. we don’t take on extra duties 3. we don’t trespass in other job descriptions. In short, don’t get your coworkers fired by taking away their work. Then, the shop steward asked how come I never come to union meetings (the reason was because I was working to pay for college, which took ALL of my other time). He said, hey you should come to the union meetings. Eventually after awhile the union was asked for a concession which they voted on at the union meeting: all student employees were getting a 50% pay cut. What!!! Well how many workers are affected, oh what good luck: only 1 single individual would be affected. But Franky the shop steward only smiled and said, see, I told you that you should attend the union meetings. Luckily my boss said, hey don’t worry about it, I can keep you at your same rate as long as you give me your notice. So I said, how about 18 months? “Sure thing!” my boss replied, and I got to keep being a renegade WITH full pay for the next 18 months. At the end of which, the shop steward made sure I cleaned out 100% of my desk and would never come back again.

(They went bankrupt a couple years later, oh well!)

It shouldn’t take that much power

Probably nothing is as inefficient as the human brain, yet people manage to learn stuff while exerting less power than a nuclear power plant.

I’m pretty sure if anybody bothered to ask chat gpt about it, he’d probably agree we’re doing a.i. wrong somehow or other.

Pffft. “Who gets a Mac,” gimme a break.

To be honest, I was issued the standard Dell laptop surveilled by Windows 11. That lasted only until lunchtime.

Then, I went to the parking garage in the basement, looked through the obsolete electronics discard box, and brought up every laptop I found down there. Two of them were Macs.

I repurposed every single one with Linux Mint (because I don’t care). So my workstation has about 7 different laptops and only one of em has the Windows.

BYOD, indeed!

Age 17, we took down the school Pet lab. We were exploring different poke addresses and stumbled upon the raster timing register, or something. If you poke it something wrong, the screen glitches out. If you poke it the right value, it goes back to normal (and don’t have to reset it). Best of all: if you poke it a series of random numbers, the screen goes berserk!

So it’s a simple one-line repeating program (on an endless loop) and the screen spazzes out continuously. So, at lunchtime the lab cleared out, and inside 5 minutes every lab terminal is running. We shut the door and walk away.

Later on, Mr. Farmer (business education teacher) opens the door and the entire lab is filled with smoke, and every single Pet is glitching out massively. In a panic he hits the breaker and shuts down the lab for a few days, until the Pet technician can come appraise the damage.

Weird thing, though. Every single terminal is working 100%! And as far as we know, Farmer never figured it out.

(This isn’t necessarily a confession, it could also just be a tall-tale.)

And yet…

Dammit, but LLM sure looks plausible. Of course, LLM can never be “artificial general intelligence,” but people won’t believe it unless it’s proven definitively. So valuations persist.

(LLMs never had any interaction with the real world, so obviously everything they state is a “hallucination.” LLMs cannot lie or exaggerate, except if they’re trained on false or exaggerated content. LLMs are incapable of thought, is there any question? As it so happens: yes, some people believe in LLM! Bewilderingly, some people believe in that crappa junk.)

In a race to somewhere

I think it’s pretty cool you can just ask the A.I. something and it spontaneously writes you a wikipedia page about it. Then you press it for details and it spews out lies and exaggerations. So “why” is it lying and exaggerating, it can’t be a part of its programming, could it? The training material itself must be full of lies and exaggeration.

Heyyyy what if A.I. is a gigantic swindle perpetrated by the computer itself? Where does the bombastic ignorance originate?

“There’s no opt out”

I bet there is!