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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • you cannot copyright a drawn apple with a piece bitten off

    That’s correct, you can not do such. Apple does not litigate its logo with copyright but in trademark disputes. Prepear and Georette are examples of this.

    You too can create a logo of an apple with a piece bitten off. It’s up to a court to decide if it’s coming too close to the Apple trademark, most people want to just avoid that and settle amicably, but if you’ve got to the pocket change to fight it in court, you can argue that your bitten off apple isn’t a trademark infringement.

    If you find a company that isn’t keen to defend their logo, you can totally get away with it. Apple is on the other end of the spectrum of being someone who will protect their trademarks to the bitter end. Jack Daniels and Disney are two more examples of companies that will legally punch a five dollar start up into a bloody mass over trademarks.





  • Literally a slight video edit made a particular group think Biden was chasing after some invisible chair during D-Day. For a particular group of folks it won’t matter about AI, they can’t even detect objectively provable false information that was done with the most minor of functions a video editor provides. Not even when the proof is literally a two second Google search for the YouTube clip of the original footage.

    AI isn’t ruining the Internet, the Internet was already ruined by people whose mind wasn’t ready for the ability for the entire world to speak to every other person on the Internet.

    I think back to that one episode in The Orville when they’re talking about how they gave some backass society a food replicator and they killed each other within five years. That’s the Internet right now. We are still in the baby phase of the Internet and there are still a ton of people who just can not wrap their mind fully around the tool that’s in front of them. For some, it’s like I gave a five year old a PSRL-1 and said, don’t hurt yourself and called it done.

    AI isn’t going to hurt people with critical thinking skills, it’s going to hurt people who never had critical thinking skills and those people are already rabid fiends running rampant on the Internet like there’s no tomorrow.




  • HVAC suffers from loss over distance. Large distances like what’s between the western US deserts and the eastern seaboard would suffer large losses to heat via HVAC.

    HVDC can solve this, but that requires an investment into this kind of infrastructure. Moving the batteries is using a preexisting infrastructure because the assumption is that new infrastructure won’t be upgraded. We will build new so long as a ROI has quick turn around, another assumption here being that long term profit planning won’t happen so everything needs to be planned to have profiting within two or less years. But we won’t build new if usage of that new happens a decade later.

    We could totally send the electrons over, but sending the batteries over is adding a bunch of assumptions that people won’t want to do massive investments in basic infrastructure to facilitate that, so we’ve got run with what we have that can ensure profits in a fairly rapid pace before investors bore of it or the next election cycle tosses everything in chaos.


  • I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

    China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.

    At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

    Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

    The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.

    For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.

    Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.

    We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

    I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

    I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.





  • In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn’t know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that’s been over hyped. A few choice hits like:

    • Crypto
    • Blockchain
    • Quantum
    • Cloud
    • WS-I
    • LAMP
    • XML
    • P2P
    • WORA
    • OOP

    Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There’s just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.

    I mean, at least it’s been this way since I’ve been in the industry.


  • I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

    This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that’s just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

    There’s a reality to these tools. That reality is they’re helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.


  • Tech vendors have also been falling over each other to tell the world how they are including GenAI in their offerings as the leading AI companies attract feverish attention from investors.

    Because you can’t hype it up for investors if you call it what it actually is. Fancy auto complete. And don’t get me wrong, I love me some of the tools out there. But this stuff is being absolutely way over hyped.

    It’s good to go into this stuff with realistic views. Will it do all your work? Absolutely not. But what it will do is do a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can get more things that require your specific attention done.

    The level of “sky is falling and we’re all going to be enslaved by AI” is literal bullshit to sell more stocks and create a bubble that will absolutely pop.





  • Say no to SaaS as much as you can

    I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don’t work in that profession.

    With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they’re going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won’t be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.