I confess, AC, I don't even know who voted their comment up.

I did note the 'increasingly' bit in the summary. That's because, as you know, this isn't new. Malicious actors have been doing this for a long time. They use these IPs for things like spamming, DDoS attacks, hiding traditional hacking at scale, and things like that.

They're just doing this more often because finding reliable hosts to provide them with compromised addresses. Then again, those hosts were already using hacked residential IP addresses.

And, yes, it's more difficult these days. I've been trying to find a reputable company (at a reasonable price) to just do a simple DDoS for me.

No, not for anything illegal. I just want to test some of my own infrastructure. It has gone through a DDoS attack a couple of times and has been just fine. But, those were short-lived (under an hour) and not very impressive as far as the numbers go. I'd like to find the breaking point so that I can work on that.

I've been doing some retro-computing stuff. It hasn't reached the point of 'serious hobby'. I just already had some old stuff and wanted to experience some stuff Id' missed back in the day. Like, I never owned an Amiga.

But, I think it might be interesting to get an SGI to play with. I'd like to see what it'll run today but, and this is something some folks overlook, it'll still do the tasks it was designed to do in the era it was meant to do so.

That or it seems like a good case to fit a modern computer.

You were quite fortunate, I should think, to have used one of those SGI workstations at the time. Though, it must have made your home computer seem pretty slow.

Then again, if that was your home computer, you were doing quite well.

You're right. Those are interesting.

For reasons, namely that they helped sponsor my research in grad school by providing hardware, we had a lot of DEC gear back then.

Then, there was the writing on the wall and you could see the demise of DEC coming, so we had a lot of Sun gear after that. At the time, depending on your position in the company, you could use a Unix or Windows. Even if you chose Windows, you could install X (X11) to access the server in a graphical way.

We did have people with beefy workstations but none of those were SGI. My company modeled traffic which was really only graphically heavy when we needed to present something to a client. Then, we'd have large scale simulations that would let you zoom into a very narrow focus. This was useful to show things like our predictions that depended on the traffic decisions they made.

I did employ traffic engineers but that was a service add-on and for in-house expertise. We mainly modeled outcomes, eventually even modeling pedestrian traffic and doing things like optimizing fleet traffic. (For example, watch a UPS truck carefully as it moves through its daily deliveries. One of the first things you'll notice is that they'll go out of their way to avoid taking a left into traffic - especially in congested areaas.)

Hmm... I'm rambling mindlessly, at this point.

But, we did sometimes need to render some pretty heavy graphics - even animated graphics with a great degree of fidelity.

Something like SGI workstations would have been great for that. We rendered the graphics on 'big iron' for the longest time.

Okay. So on the off chance that is a genuine and good-faith but misguided attempt to be helpful or insightful and not just more trolling...

1)
I have never said the democratic party is perfect. And I defy you to find me saying so anywhere. But when the entire neighborhood is burning down and the firefighters are out to lunch... or they're the ones who started the blaze in the first place; one does not concern themselves with relative trivialities like the clutter in the garage or even the Lego bricks lurking in the living room carpet.

2)
The tl;dr of everything you wrote is that if I would just give up all of my values and principles, capitulate to the enemy, and hope that the same people who've made it perfectly clear that they see me as sub-human and who want to see me run out of society and the country or, more ideally, to just die; will... what? Be merciful enough if I surrender to let me live on and hang around as a second-class citizen without the rights that are supposed to go with it and without any say in how I am governed?

And that's supposed to be some kind of "win" for me and mine? I'm supposed to be happy, or even just satisifed, with that? Would YOU just meekly lie down for the slaughter? Would cheerfully YOU accept forever being a second-class not-quite-citizen, at best? Or would you go down fighting instead?

> spare me the MAGA accusations. I much prefer a
> government with a lot of Democrats in it, even if I
> have issues with their science denial

Well, if you don't want MAGA accusations, maybe you should not be simping for them by parroting the MAGA narrative that democrats, and not republicans, are the party of science denialism. I mean... FFS... have you SEEN the bullshit coming out of RFK, "doctor" Oz, the HHS department, the slashing of science and research grants, and all their shenanigans with the EPA? But of course you have seen all of that. Your talking point is just more of the typical DARVO, like you people habitually engage in with not a whit of self-awareness.

So Who'll .. do the tough jobs

I think that for most use-UBI-to-deal-with-AI advocates, the premise is that robots will do that, and presumably would already be doing it by the time UBI is enacted.

If this is a problem (i.e. robots can't do it yet, or they can't do it as economically as humans), then you're not in a post-work situation yet, so you can't have a post-work utopia yet.

Keep improving those robots! You're not done until unemployment is over 90%, and ideally not until 100% though that may be asymptotic.

And yet these very same people who very obviously want the poor to suffer and die ALSO have this weird obsession with the narrative they made up that the world's population is actually collapsing and we all need to make more babies to save the human race; hence Dobbs, their attacks against LGBT people, forcing all that bible crap into the schools, et cetera.

Make that make sense.

What does *he* envision a hypothetical scenario where AI has taken over an extremely large amount of the labor?

Your question wouldn't make any sense to him or any other Trump supporter. Let me rephrase it so that it can be answered by MAGA.

What does he envision, in a scenario where the people Trump currently steals from, no longer have anything to steal? How does a thief find new victims once the old ones are used up?

I think the best MAGA answer to that, is that someone will own the AIs, and reap the "wages" that the AIs earn. Steal from them, because they'll have something to steal. AI will be no different than anything else which changes the distribution of prey: you just gotta keep up with who and where the prey are.

Yup. That's the one. I'm reasonably convinced (from pictures and Wikipedia) that was an SGI Octane.

I was impressed with the RAM that it had. At the time, there were still some servers that had less RAM and only expensive workstations had that much RAM.

At the risk of invoking the Death of the Author trope, I don't agree with him here (and I note that he leaves that open too, by saying he personally doesn't want to and not excluding others from wanting to)..

Markdown is now a way doing shorthand formatted typing, effectively. What it's original purpose was is interesting, but not a limitation ('make', for example, was not made for software development but for compiling books). I'm computer-centric, not mobile-centric. A way of formatting bullets and tables without having to move my hands off the keyboard is great for me.

Be interested to see how it handles the round trip - can I take an existing note and edit it using Markdown for instance. But overall - can't see this as anything but a good thing.

Google is absolutely collecting your personal information.

They aren't really selling it, however. You can't go to Google and say, "Here's ten bucks. Let me see KGIII's information."

They're selling access to your metrics, however. You're profiled and assigned a market segment with pretty good accuracy. They know who you are, what your interests are, what your interests really are, all the pages you've gone to, etc.. (Royal you, not you specifically.)

The people paying Google are paying them to target people in X, Y, and Z categories for the purpose of promotion. They don't actually sell your personal information - at least not from what I can tell (and I have purchased ads before). They weren't very good ads. I wasn't even selling anything. I just wanted to see what buying ads did. (It did very little. My case should probably not be considered as data.)

I guess you could say that they sell access to a person's predicted behavior and not their actual information.

But, from behind the curtain, I didn't see any magic box to search for KGIII's data and then an option to buy said data. They sell that information in aggregate, seemingly keeping it pretty well protected. My own government has lost control of my data. Google appears to have not done so. It's kind of weird that way.

Yeah, it can be a pretty fun debate topic. I'm not sure that I'm willing to invest the energy into doing so, as there's no real benefit.

Even if we reached a point of agreement, or even enlightenment, there'd be little benefit. Few people are willing to change a firmly held belief, even when faced with conflicting information. It happens but we're rationalizing beings instead of rational beings.

That said, I think many people might (if properly coaxed) agree that we, from a view of pragmatism, should 'cull the herd'. The big difference will be who it is making those decisions. I'm not sure that I'd agree with that viewpoint when there are adequate resources. (We currently have adequate resources, they're just poorly distributed for so many complex reasons that can be summed up as 'we humans are kinda shitty'.)

In the long view, I'd not be even a wee bit surprised if we caused our own extinction. I also think it's hubris to believe that we're the evolutionary end-game and the true apex.

Man... I now kind of want to eat a bunch of mushrooms and then mull this one over for a bit.

You do know that you can buy insulin needles without a prescription, right?

If you're not mainlining your Tang, you're doing it wrong.

That sounds right. They worked for a very famous studio at the time, perhaps even a couple of them, doing things like CGI.

Said machine was a beast in its day. The specs and specifics have long been forgotten but I recall that performance levels were quite high. They worked on some pretty famous movies and were good enough that they did so via remote work even back then. He did have high speed internet to his home but I think it was just a T1 or maybe some ISDN line. I don't think he had a full T3 but he might have. It's not like he was paying for it out of his pocket. We're talking 25 years ago, or something like that. So, the details are quite fuzzy.

I've never been into video manipulation or creating graphics but he was quite skilled and worked on movies I'm sure you're familiar with. I guess it's not doxxing him to point out that he worked for Pixar for quite a while. So, whatever Pixar used might be what he was using. I haven't heard from him in decades. He would sometimes talk about making his nest egg and getting out. He may have done that.

Yeah, as I think about it, SGI sounds right to me. The case was blue-ish but I'm partially colorblind.

That's why we (jokingly) did a cadence of 'rape, murder, pillage, burn'.

Any order other than that is just barbaric!

NOTE: None of those things are really all that socially acceptable.