cutmetal's recent activity

  1. Comment on Russia poisoned Alexei Navalny with dart frog toxin, European nations say in ~society

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    ???

    I still vividly remember his phone call with the agent who poisoned him where he pretended to be the guy's higher up and was grilling him about why he fucked up the assassination, and getting the guy to explain exactly how he carried out the poisoning (the whole toxin in the underwear thing).

    ???

    1 vote
  2. Comment on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend $38 billion on warehouse conversions in ~society

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    You can. They'll probably use a concrete saw or jackhammer to break a channel where the water and sewer pipes need to go, lay them, and then concrete back over the top.

    You can. They'll probably use a concrete saw or jackhammer to break a channel where the water and sewer pipes need to go, lay them, and then concrete back over the top.

    5 votes
  3. Comment on Voyager Technologies CEO says space data center cooling problem still needs to be solved in ~space

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    The idea is that if you put solar panels in space, they produce consistent power all the time, no dealing with night time, cloudiness etc. Plus the atmosphere absorbs a lot of the sun's energy so...

    The idea is that if you put solar panels in space, they produce consistent power all the time, no dealing with night time, cloudiness etc. Plus the atmosphere absorbs a lot of the sun's energy so if the panels are in space you don't have to deal with that.

    That said it costs like $10,000/kg to put things in space (maybe less these days) so the world in which it makes economic sense to build space data centers looks a lot different than the world we live in now.

    8 votes
  4. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    Nope, it's weirder than that. Keep scrolling, the Solomon guy running this place was associated with another guy who's been in prison since 2023 for operating a similar illegal bio lab, I remember...

    Nope, it's weirder than that. Keep scrolling, the Solomon guy running this place was associated with another guy who's been in prison since 2023 for operating a similar illegal bio lab, I remember that other case. Weird shit!

    3 votes
  5. Comment on Sleeping Giant – Mobilizer Of Evil (2025) in ~music

    cutmetal
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    I scrolled deep into tildes and was shocked to see that a tiny band I love had released new music and I wasn't aware! But, wrong Sleeping Giant 🙃...

    I scrolled deep into tildes and was shocked to see that a tiny band I love had released new music and I wasn't aware!

    But, wrong Sleeping Giant 🙃

    https://sleepinggiantband.bandcamp.com/album/sleeping-giant

    1 vote
  6. Comment on How well can you predict the state of the world in 2041? in ~life

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    A haiku by chocobean

    Oh, it's you! Ping me
    In sixteen years, and also
    Congratulations

    A haiku by chocobean

    3 votes
  7. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of January 19 in ~society

    cutmetal
    Link
    https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-weapon-maduro-drug-strikes-c052fd24a350a04a458f501b4b536e62 Sounds like the Maduro kidnapping was a disaster in yet another way - now the US has revealed...

    https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-weapon-maduro-drug-strikes-c052fd24a350a04a458f501b4b536e62

    Sounds like the Maduro kidnapping was a disaster in yet another way - now the US has revealed the existence of these secret weapons systems and shown their use in combat. Hopefully the legit adversaries don't get the full picture of what these can do and how to counter them due to their use in Caracas.

    Also if anyone comes across good links going into detail or speculation about these weapons systems please post them :)

    4 votes
  8. Comment on The Dark Tower Wizard in Glass, is the second half better? in ~books

    cutmetal
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    When I first got into the Dark Tower books, I was an angsty teenager and it was the first half of the aughts. At that point it was still a few years away from Wolves of the Calla being published....

    When I first got into the Dark Tower books, I was an angsty teenager and it was the first half of the aughts. At that point it was still a few years away from Wolves of the Calla being published. Wizard and Glass was my favorite of the first four, but I was deeply in love with my first girlfriend, so that plus my teenage angst may have made the doomed romance plot resonate with me. Don't know how I'd feel about it today.

    As others have said and iirc, the story of Wizard and Glass is basically unconnected to the rest of it, if it's making you so mad you should definitely skip past that part and read a synopsis elsewhere.

    2 votes
  9. Comment on Razzie Awards nominations: ‘Snow White,’ Ice Cube-starring ‘War of the Worlds’ lead with six nods each in ~movies

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    If you aren't already familiar, Honest Trailers is usually excellent for a deep draught of snark, and they really went to town on War of the Worlds: https://youtu.be/SLahR0K8Fss?si=3LGDuK3LQigNpc7c

    If you aren't already familiar, Honest Trailers is usually excellent for a deep draught of snark, and they really went to town on War of the Worlds: https://youtu.be/SLahR0K8Fss?si=3LGDuK3LQigNpc7c

    1 vote
  10. Comment on The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of large language models in ~tech

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    Maybe I'm not jacked in enough to know what you're referring to, but the linked article seemed like a scholarly presentation of empirical research to me, not FUD. They used a bunch of open-weight...

    They use FOMO, FUD, and dubious claims

    Maybe I'm not jacked in enough to know what you're referring to, but the linked article seemed like a scholarly presentation of empirical research to me, not FUD.

    all they do is post more "research" that always proves how amazing their LLMs are.

    They used a bunch of open-weight models to draw conclusions about LLMs in general.

    These things exist in the world. Like them or not, we should try to understand them. I was fascinated by the piece.

    7 votes
  11. Comment on Doppi, the nicest player for your music files in ~tech

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    That's actually sort of a neat idea. Imagine something to that effect baked into the license itself: "In the event of $maintainer's death, incapacitation, or dereliction of duty, this source code...

    has said they will open source foobar2000 if it gets to the point that they can no longer maintain it

    That's actually sort of a neat idea. Imagine something to that effect baked into the license itself: "In the event of $maintainer's death, incapacitation, or dereliction of duty, this source code is to be relicensed and made available under a [MIT|BSD|GPL] license, fulling replacing the terms of this license in perpetuity."

    4 votes
  12. Comment on AI friends too cheap to meter in ~tech

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    That first line in particular jumped out at me too. The piece on the whole was thoughtful and well-written, but that line didn't really seem to fit with the rest of the argument to me. To me it...

    That first line in particular jumped out at me too. The piece on the whole was thoughtful and well-written, but that line didn't really seem to fit with the rest of the argument to me. To me it felt like that line resonated with the writer, and they couldn't resist including it. In creative writing, writers are encouraged to "kill their darlings," meaning if something feels really clever it may just be too clever. Guessing this line was a darling that the writer couldn't kill.

    3 votes
  13. Comment on What video games would you say have the best stories? Feel free to suggest more than one. in ~games

    cutmetal
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    Perhaps my favorite game on the Gamecube is called Eternal Darkness. I'm not sure how it would hold up today, don't think I've played it since it was current gen, but the story absolutely sunk its...

    Perhaps my favorite game on the Gamecube is called Eternal Darkness. I'm not sure how it would hold up today, don't think I've played it since it was current gen, but the story absolutely sunk its hooks into teenage me.

    4 votes
  14. Comment on Backing up Spotify in ~music

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    The sort of people who are most involved with music piracy are the kind of people who are likely giving the most money to musicians. Generally they're huge fans. The barrier to entry is high...

    The sort of people who are most involved with music piracy are the kind of people who are likely giving the most money to musicians. Generally they're huge fans. The barrier to entry is high enough to get into music piracy these days that normie music consumers will likely just pay for Spotify or Prime or iTunes or whatever the kids use these days to not own music. The guy deeply involved in private trackers, with a hundred terabytes of storage filled with flacs, also has hundreds of records, t-shirts, and goes to shows monthly.

    13 votes
  15. Comment on Upon this rock in ~music

    cutmetal
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    https://archive.is/9fgn5 A very long piece from 2004 that I found linked from an AP article about the recent rise of Christian music - the AP quoted this piece, where the author says that...

    https://archive.is/9fgn5

    A very long piece from 2004 that I found linked from an AP article about the recent rise of Christian music - the AP quoted this piece, where the author says that Christian music is "excellence-proof," which is pithy and funny and hooked me.

    The author's experience of being around Christians at the concert is maybe what resonated most for me. In my experience, evangelicals are usually very nice, but very dull.

    A lot has changed in the 20 years since this was written, but one thing has not - Christian music still sucks.

    3 votes
  16. Comment on Reversing the technical interview in ~comp

  17. Comment on Reversing the technical interview in ~comp

    cutmetal
    Link
    Somebody in the comments wrote the William Gibson version:

    Somebody in the comments wrote the William Gibson version:

    It was hot, the night I burned the Seeker. Moths batted themselves to death against the humming neon signs just outside the single window in the cramped room. There were ancient electronics piled to the ceiling in here, hot new chipsets from Taiwan still unwrapped distributed unevenly amongst them. The Seeker put his hands on his hips, brushing aside the corners of his Sukajan jacket bomber jacket replica. "I heard you and Bobby were hotshots, once. Real.. artístes", he said, the last word paired with a smug grin. "Heard you could do things." "Things like what?" It's been 20 seconds and you've already wasted too many cycles with this guy. "Things like making lists, just, fold up inside themselves. Come out the other way around. Crazy things." You grit your teeth. The dex has left your system and you're starting to feel a massive drug deficiency coming on. "Crazy things cost money", you manage. The lists already unfurling in your head, you start typing as quickly as you can to hide the microtremors.

    9 votes
  18. Comment on Tildes login session management? in ~tildes

    cutmetal
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    This is maybe not helpful, but based on talklittle's answer in the child comments here it sounds like there is a session invalidation endpoint in the tildes rest api. If you can figure out what...

    This is maybe not helpful, but based on talklittle's answer in the child comments here it sounds like there is a session invalidation endpoint in the tildes rest api. If you can figure out what that is via docs or reading the code (which I think is open source?) then you should be able to craft a curl command to invalidate a session, if you have an active session open and available to you. If you don't have the session available in a browser tab then you'll have to additionally look for an endpoint to list sessions for your account.

    2 votes
  19. Comment on Tildes login session management? in ~tildes

    cutmetal
    Link Parent
    Thanks for the work you do! I'm not the OP here but I use the awesome Three Cheers app. On the user page/tab there's a Log Out button at the top, given your answer here I suppose this just logs...

    Thanks for the work you do! I'm not the OP here but I use the awesome Three Cheers app. On the user page/tab there's a Log Out button at the top, given your answer here I suppose this just logs you out of the app but doesn't invalidate the session to the server?

    4 votes