1940: “These mechanical monstrosities lack the intuitive check of a human mind. A mathematician can spot a stray digit through reason; a machine will blindly process an error to its conclusion. We are trading the elegance of thought for a noisy, fallible crate of glass and wire.”

1950: “Direct control is the only honest way to command a machine. If you cannot visualize the specific vacuum tube you are firing, you aren’t truly programming. To delegate this to any intermediary is to invite a loss of precision that the hardware simply cannot afford.”

1955: “These ‘mnemonics’ are a crutch for the lazy. By using words instead of addresses, the programmer loses the vital ‘feel’ for memory layout. We are seeing a five-fold decrease in efficiency; no automated assembler can ever match the tight, hand-calculated loops of a master of bits.”

1965: “Compilers are the death of performance. These languages allow ‘programmers’ who don’t even understand the CPU architecture to bloat memory with generic subroutines. Software is becoming a black box—impenetrable, unoptimized, and dangerously detached from the reality of the silicon.”

… did you just post “Why are ‘Why is X bad?’ posts bad?”

Oh dear. I hadn’t thought of that. poof

I’m fairly sure this isn’t something human brains can do

Friends smarter than me assure me these are more likely to… whattaya call it when the wire breaks inside the sleeve… that.

… I still like them.

Then you dream anew

No no no. I gave them CULTURE! A wonderful work culture.

And security! Sure, not the security I decided I need for myself, and it’s only really present as long as they’re profitable to me, but security nonetheless.

After all, I had the idea and stuck my neck out to secure the financing, which is far more important than the actual daily labor that keeps things running.

We’re like a family, see.

Everyone laughs at the precisely arranged layers of folded blankets at the foot of the bed until they wake up shivering.

Same for my mountain of pillows of different thickness.

Maybe keep a little critical information on a dead man’s switch and let that be known when revealing the rest.

Idk if actually wise, but it seems like you might want to keep some leverage for self protection

The vacuum sealer reminds me: a handheld electric pump.

Some are strong enough to blow up car tires. Especially if you have kids, they’re great for inflating water toys and balls and whatnot.

Second the warm white Christmas lights.

They can quickly make a depressing apartment feel like a warm home.

LAN tester.

I thought of it as fancy electrician / network equipment. Not anymore. Now it’s basic troubleshooting / procedure.

On a particularly frustrating switch installation, I picked one up for like $20 on Amazon, and it’s made me much less annoyed by network changes.

For context, I’m one of those people who hoards any electronic bits that might prove useful on a hobby project later, so lots of old patch cables and cable reels with unknown breaks, so maybe a LAN tester is really only worth it for others like that, but I’d recommend it to any level of tech enthusiast at least.

In a sense, more people working towards secret protection generally did result in better secret protection, like encryption algorithms and secure architecture and whatnot.

It only starts to become a paradox when you get into actually executing the task of protecting a specific secret… but I think we could draw that line somewhere for almost any task.

There is a point of generality where more people means better results and a point of specificity where you only want the exact right number of people.

To satisfy the curiosity, just download Ollama. You can run your interactions locally, no feeding the demon and full privacy.

Set up a modelfile with system prompts for the kind of personality you want to create. Do some googling, may want to tweak settings to get response creativity just right. Higher parameter base models generally better and more hardware costly.

If you want pics, you can use StableDiffusion. I recommend using docker images because it’s really complicated and environment sensitive.

You can tie the two together with a little Python logic and have the core bot prompt the image generator at certain chat moments. Ironically, if you’re not comfortable writing code, you could just get VSCode and Gemini and spit out some pretty okay Python code without strong understanding.

There are also tools for local audio generation I’m less familiar with but am sure Google could get you there.

Maybe start with a basic Ollama setup and see if it feels like it’s working for you.