I’m Stalmaning while I work on a pretzel joke ;-)

Slowly uploading my media collection from a slowly dying TrūNAS box up to B2… slowly 😬

I really want to try some of their stuff but it’s always sold out at the EPA store. I keep meaning to make a pilgrimage up to Emeryville but I have a suspicion it’s going to be the same. Plus I’d just rather visit friends if I go all the way to the east bay.

I think I just need to get out more 😌

Sounds like a good fit for ESPHome.

Oh man… it’s coming back to me now. Was there some kind of weird council of space-elders or something like that? I kinda vaguely remember a scene where MacCloud testifying and lights going on like campfire ghost stories when each person talks?

IDK, I might be mixing in some Dr. Who 🤓

PLONK “My eeeeeyyyyes!”

LOL! I managed to briefly forget that Futurama did it better :-)

I had no clue they had made so many. Thanks for the bonus tip… was it just bad-bad or cheesy bad? Because I feel like a large part of the appeal for me is the vague cheesiness of the whole series.

Edit: Got a Standard directors cut, and the renegade version… But in the process, I rediscovered that I recently downloaded Hot to Trot because it was on somebody’s list of worst movies ever. So I’m gonna have to watch that first 😝

I thought I remember hearing that they leave some of them around just as a reminder… But I could be making that up.

You’ve gotta love how much classier European graffiti is.

My first reaction was: wow it really rained that year at burning man 😝

Nice! I’m gonna have to go back and watch that… either I’ve never seen that version or I’d completely forgotten about that detail.

And I even watched the TV show ;-)

Solid plan… until I drop my eyeglasses 😉

I mean… after society collapses, you can just raid a library for good old-fashioned paper books. Provided the idiots haven’t burned them for warmth.

LOL “…but we know it was us who blacked the sky.”

—Morpheus (And not the Timothée Chalamet version)

How so? Is the hardware that special? One computer is much like the next you just have to be creative in repurposing them. Linux runs on millions of devices that a great deal of the population would consider highly obsolete. Just an example, I’m not saying that that’s the actual answer to this question. It might be, I’m just kind of completely ignorant as to what kind of hardware these companies are installing… It sounds like a lot of memory and a lot of GPU power.

I think you explained it well… My father got let go from GE when their nuclear power plant business collapsed.

I call us a nuclear family as a bit of dry humor. That said I still hold out some hope for it as a viable means of energy production. The two key meltdowns that took it off the game board were preventable human error.

Chernobyl is an environmental nightmare… but largely caused by combination of ignorance and hubris. Three Mile Island could have gone much worse… nobody died, no significant contamination. More recently Fukushima… but again, had the backup generators been properly elevated above historical flood levels it would not have been a meltdown.

Solar has some environmental concerns that are currently being largely ignored. The panels currently used some nasty stuff that stays hidden in china where the bulk of them are produced… but there are advances in new panel chemistry on a regular basis, hopefully a few of those will scale.

Hydro can be done well, it generally isn’t, but there’s some notable exceptions, Niagara Falls comes to mind.

But ultimately all that would be a complete waste on Ai… I don’t think the reliability will ever quite get there. It has its applications, always has… but general intelligence isn’t really one of them, IMHO. That said I know scores of people that are not even 92% accurate, so who knows? ;-) I certainly wouldn’t mind a robot slave to do my chores… but Ai isn’t really the issue there. You don’t need a “thinking machine” to do laundry and vacuum. Thought I suppose you didn’t need an Android either…

Robot vacuums seem to work quite well, and once someone makes an affordable automatic washing machine capable of being loaded with a hopper and spitting nicely folded clothes out the other end you don’t need an anthropomorphic robot. The value there is only in adapting to a world of appliances built for bipeds.

But as humans (in the royal sense) we do a lot of dumb things that could more easily be handled with a phone call/email/video chat.

Basing anything on a finite resource like natural gas is ultimately the wrong idea… Hopefully, we perfect something better, I really don’t care what it is as long as it’s better :-)

There’s probably going to be a large data center or 10 for sale in a few years 🤞🏻

Nice! 😊

Oh, I think this was just TSA going “Wires and switches, OH MY!”

I had packed all this stuff up days ago… IIRC they were the little Parallax Beatles too, so we’re not talking about something crazy with saw blades and all that jazz… just two little 8x8x8 robots that looked like a Barbie Steam Roller with a cute little breadboard on to.

What’s odd is it’s only at PDX, which kinda indicates that they have their own list of suspected Mad Bombers “What bombs at midnight, baby!”

I have not flown through there for years, but literally every Christmas for 4 years, and then like 8 years later!

The swab always turns purple/pink… and they always run it through some kind of chemical analyzer… not sure exactly what it is, but ancient enough to have an amber phosphorus CRT built into the front. It always shows the same 2 peeks… sadly it’s to far away to actually read the scale at the bottom of the graph.

Probably whatever is on the “human detector,” I’m assuming alcohol by the smell… and something that turns purple. Total smoke show 🤣

Just don’t travel without putting it in checked baggage… that’s just TSA bate. I traveled with a pair of battlebot kits once and they still swab my wrists every time I go through PDX 🤓