Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Did my first session of volunteering at the shelter. Essentially just hung out in the cat room for 3 hours playing with kitties.

I had to let the staff know about a kitty that had a cold, they were really appreciative about it. I guess some other volunteers instead of coming to get a staff member would just leave a note on the sign out sheet :/

It was SO hard to not want to take them home with me. Or to see cats who almost got adopted but the people changed their minds. I think I am going to have to work on my cat salesman routine and help the kitties out in the future.

Im not sure if its just me but im thinking Typescript overly complex and hard to read.

Well, I guess that depicts well my current stage in programming: im already confortable with the basics of OOP, but I still feel uneasy when I start reading about generics.

I mean, can anyone sane understand whats the point of this?
interface SearchableCollection<T extends shapeType> extends Collection<T> {
find(name: string): T | undefined;
}

It probably has a point but if it combs its hair it probably won't show.

AI Voice acting:

https://beta.elevenlabs.io/

pick conversation/bella

Copy and paste this into the box

The beastmen thrived in the ensuing era of darkness. But the demihuman Galka and Mitthra, blessed with bodies powerful enough to resist the advances of the beastmen, grew in number as well. They fought tooth and nail to cast the hordes from their homelands in an age of unending battle and chaos.

You can also take a voice clip from voice actors, input it and it will clone it and use that in the same way.

Am I the only one that just learned about ChatGTP this week?

I mean, the name doesnt even sounds remarkable to me.

I think most people aren't noticing we are in a literal AI revolution right now and it's a big deal, just as the industrial revolution and computer resolution were before it. The sheer number of jobs that are about to become obsolete or just unprofitable to do is astounding. If nothing else, wages are going to nosedive in these professions.

Teaching, helpline staff, journalism, music creation, art creation, programming, writing, song creation...list goes on and on. You'll still have the best people working, but the lower level staff will be gone.

We might even reach Wallmart levels where the government pays the company to employ people they don't want, just for social reasons.

I actually have been noticing it since 2021.

Supposelly the end of the most strict pandemic measure was supposed to return back our life to normality but no, instead, we just rushed to the other side, to a drastic change in western society structure.

Its already unfair to relate this to the pandemic. Actual pandemic wasnt more than 3 months. But that made a fog over the structural changes going on, and people still blame pandemic for this, instead of noticing that more and more, only few selected players in society are becoming omnipotent.

Amazon basically destroyed all physical commerce. There is really no point going to shopping centers to buy stuffs, given how fast is the delivey, how cheap its and how wide is the variety of things you have access.

Delivery food basically destroyed good amount of small/medium sized restaurants. Its slower but sure eventually we gonna have a one-only food store, amazon-like.

As food and store are in decay, so is the city. Less client, plus home-office reduces severely the economical viability for any business in the street. This leads to emptier streets, more dangerous, in a vicious cycle that more and more move the people out of those places. Then impacting also general services like dentists, clinics, etc.

But if you also reduces the small/medium sized commerce, thats a huge problem to employeement. Less work, less money, more people unemployeed, in an once again vicious cycle.

Yeah, I believe we are in a transition to a far worse state.

Darwin already said, nature is ruled by the law of the fittest. That means, people who can adapt to any changes in the environment will always have the edge regardless of what structural changes happen. But I believe, this maleability to adapt is restrit to a very small percentage of our population. Many will suffer if things keep going on like that.

The worst part is, like you said, most arent even aware of whats going on. For part of them, the culprit is the pandemic. And if this was true, supposelly we would return back to before.

But that is not the case. Pandemic already have nothing to do with our current society/life.

Let the machines take over everything, Give UBI, go full Wall-E

The future is yummy.

(and then at some point even the machines will figure out that work is *** stupid and kill us all)((Much faster than humans figured it out))

Well, we are basically becoming Matrix.

The difference is that the use the authors gave to humans for them to be kept alive by the machine was "producing energy".

But that was simply a lame excuse to make it more palatable to expectators. Using humans as battery is nowhere near an efficient method.

The original concept was using humans as biological CPU. Maybe would be a more reasonable use for our physical bodies. We gonna be forever just data generators to be capture by computers and provide an infinite source of knowledge to machines.

Holy crap. That's... scary good >_>;

I ran out of credits to play with this but the really amazing part is you can upload a voice clip from anything (As long as it is clear, with no music) and it will imitate that voice. It's not even hard to do.

So lets say you wanted to make XI fully voice acted, you could input professional voice actors for every character that fit and make them say the lines. You can even enter Japanese voice acting, and it will say perfect english in the output with that voice.

I'm not really worried about the financial impact of "what will people do to earn a living once we're all replaced?"....the concept of purpose in human life, and the vast majority of a population not feeling like they have a purpose any more worries me much more. We're multiple generations who still find personal value and purpose in what we do, be it a line worker at Amazon or a Professor at a University- and our society is set up to further that sense of purpose by attaching income to it, and thus survival.

In the extreme long run, the income aspect is fixable by a violent change of our economy and society if we accept AI "taking over" roles we used to view as "irreplaceable". But if the majority of humans are able to just sit at home and not worry about where their next meal is coming from, or paying their bills, the bigger concern to me is all those people just bored. Lifespans will shorten, violence will increase just out of that boredom, and progress will stagnate. Mostly because we're just programmed to find the easy way, and nothing's easier than doing nothing.

The way we reacted to the pandemic had nothing to do with the virus or how dangerous it was, it had everything to do with social media and the internet. Because we are so hooked in with everyone else and so perma online, mass hysteria is far more common place now. We are like sheep in the field or birds in the tree, one starts to panic and we all have a tenancy to do it and it spreads like a wildfire.

Ultimately we are animals, and when we see others panicking we start to panic and it's just human nature because we are still somewhat governed by our instincts. It does not matter how smart you are, it's just how we're wired.

Every pandemic or health emergency from here on out will be like this and utter chaos now. People are going to panic, governments are going to lock down from public demand and it's going to be a sh**show every time. As such it makes sense to just accept this is the new reality and alter society to take it into account.

The biggest problem we have is that our tech is advancing far faster than we are, our brains have barely changed at all in the last few thousand years. We are laughably easy to manipulate by bad actors as a species, and the internet is full of people who know the mechanics on how to do it.

Even something silly like a video game can manipulate us into spending more money, and it's not even hard. Even if we know how this stuff works, it still works.

Text to speech is surprisingly good nowadays.

I tried to invest some time looking for this before, but quality was too low.

But past weeks i revisited this topic, downloaded the free text-to-speech from Microsoft store, and, man, its great. Dude speaking is very understandable even for a non-native english speaker like me.

Since them, ive been converting few books to speech so i can hear them while walking. Depending on the book (if its more text based and have few images/code/table), then its a great experience.

I never noticed how short a large book can be if only heard.

Its a given my reading is slow. I read like 300/400 pages in a month. But i managed to hear 100s in like 3 hours, meaning i could finish a 500-page book in like 2 weeks while walking

One can say that hearing has less comprehension quality than actually reading, and i agree. But i feel like nowaday there isnt much point stressing the same book. Plus, mentally indexing parts of book is more valuable than fully comprehend sections of it. Indexing a book will allow a better understanding and performance when reading another book from the same topic.

I believe knowledge is iterative anyway. You only learn when you read-apply-reread-reapply.

When learnin, ive been inclining to believe quantity is netter than quality. Afterall, better to attack twice than attacking once if you arent dealing 200% dmg

But how much do you read on the web?

Personally my print reading has fallen way behind my on line reading. I am not saying this is a good thing, just an observed fact.

I mean, reading technical books.

I feel like completing a book is like my own measure of aptitude in a technical subject.

Entertainment reading, I surely could do thousand pages in a month. Mainly mangas. When I see a good completed title, i will surely marathon it. Yearly probably I should read like a dozen of entire series only casually reading before sleep.

But i think 2023 will be completely different. I nearly finished one of the most important books I need to read, Im halfway to the other and progressing the third one through audio.

Goal is 100 pages for weekend. At least 20 per weekday.

Every trailer looks better than the last! It's so good! @_@;

Pre-release screeners went out to reviewers and such (a full 6 episodes) and all the comments seem to be so positive.
I can't wait 2 nore weeks dammit! (y'A')y

Finally getting into Wings of The Goddess, awwww yeah.

This steady trip down memory lane is so great.

The Omega Protocol was cleared about half an hour ago and they fielded a MCH in their clear. Wild to think that what is considered the worst DPS of XIV to be in the world first kill for this fight. Might have something to do with buff limitations though from what I understand.

Even though I don't play XIV anymore, looking forward to seeing the clear video(s) when they are released.

That kind of happens every world first for Ultimates, doesn't it?

Like didn't UCOB have a DRK in the comp at a time where DRK wasn't meta?

I didn't honestly keep track for UWU or TEA. Nor TOP. Nor DSR.

But I guess I did hear that TOP has a part where Omega puts so many debuffs on you that it overwrites most of your buffs. Like if you pot during what would otherwise be a standard pot window at some point, you lose your pot buff to Omega's ***feast.

Yeah, I have seen pics of BLMs "dodging" their Ley Lines because of buff limitations.

It seems like a lot of people are amused by this development despite it being a glaring developer over sight. People seem to like the fact that Omega is essentially exploiting a game engine limitation to enhance their chances of survival. A very Omega thing to do. Lol.

lies

MCN is really good after the buffs in 6.3, not too unusual. Beats every other rDPS besides BLM and it's only about 200 behind that. The fact they can toss out a Reprisal now is huge too. Gives MCN 2 10% party mitigation abilities.

3rd episode of tlou was heavy. wow.

They are putting in serious effort.
(But will still get complaints that it's not how it happened in the game)

apparently, it was already renewed for a season 2 after just 2 episodes and all the buzz generated.

I was really furious with the direction HBO seemed to be going after the merger with Discovery, and I'm still going to wait and see how the next(last?) season of "Succession" pans out, but tlou definitely is giving me hope they still care about serious, big-budget drama.

HBO hits when it wants to.

For every other time that it doesn't want to hit, there's season 8 Got and Velma