Random Thoughts II

[StN]

Originally Posted by The Press

The new LGNZ president wants councils to “stop with the Auckland jokes”.

Well they started it - They voted for Brown!

[StN]

A perve?
A slick dancer.
And a big enough vampire from Buffy to make it into the Shadows council.

A bit funny - Meh. RIP I guess.

[Ab]

Originally Posted by Nich

RIP Chick Corea.

The only musician who has made me hallucinate while watching live music.

Bump because I realised I never heard the explanation for this. Nich...?

[StN]

So apparently the Ninja Creami is the best thing since sliced bread for making ice cream and gelato. And you can freeze protein powder and make non-fat cream freeze?

Googles availability.

Nope, none in NZ..

[Savage]

Originally Posted by StN

So apparently the Ninja Creami is the best thing since sliced bread for making ice cream and gelato. And you can freeze protein powder and make non-fat cream freeze?

Googles availability.

Nope, none in NZ..

It's out of stock on all listed vendor sites as well as the manufacturer site itself That would be bloody brilliant for protein shake ice cream o.O

The one site that allows you to add it to basket also simultaneously declares:
"Australia Post Delivers within 76-79 Days. $20

Order before 4pm today for estimated delivery between Monday 23rd October and Thursday 26th October"

[wazza]

de niro's grandson had quite the cocktail

[MadMax]

Dang. I’ve been walking past galbraiths for the past week and didn’t even notice …

[Ab]

Speaking thereof, I may be in the 09 Dec-Jan. Details as they come to hand.

[StN]

Originally Posted by MadMax

Dang. I’ve been walking past galbraiths for the past week and didn’t even notice …

Originally Posted by GB website

SCAFFOLDS UP? WE ARE STILL OPEN 7 DAYS!
Unfortunately due to the hideous weather we have all been enduring the scaffolding is still up and painting of the building is ongoing, but we should be able to reveal our new colours very soon.

Or is it something worse?

[wazza]

Just discovered Tiny Desk Concert on Youtube, where have I been

[Lightspeed]

Originally Posted by Ab

Speaking thereof, I may be in the 09 Dec-Jan. Details as they come to hand.

[MadMax]

Originally Posted by StN

Or is it something worse?

Oh nah just missed the opportunity for a random fight with one of you lot.

[Lightspeed]

The latest space tourism flight by Virgin Galactic looks like that single largest consignment of hair ever launched into space.

[Lightspeed]

[MadMax]

Fortunately there's a filter you can enable to clear that and a flood of other weird asian porn games.

https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences or within Steam itself: Click the Manage Account button (the one with your avatar icon) -> Store Preferences. Turn off the two ticks under both "Frequent Nudity or Sexual Content" and "Adult Only Sexual Content". Content of both of those is pure shit.

[Lightspeed]

It's interesting that the impulse when encountering a lost toddler in Auckland today was to jump on Facebook and search local groups to find if anyone was missing their toddler.

It's kinda cyberpunk really. People are that immersed in that world. Thankfully someone called the cops pretty quickly.

[Ab]

There was a case here in Oz recently, a girl was walking home late at night and got followed by a stalker. Her phone was running out of juice and every second counted. Did she:

a) call her parents or
b) call the police?

just kidding, she:

c) got on FB and asked her followers what she should do. Just before her phone died and she got raped and murdered.

[Nich]

Originally Posted by Ab

Bump because I realised I never heard the explanation for this. Nich...?

It was at a time when I was at Uni studying the hell out of Jazz piano. This was one of the solo Chick Corea shows that is kind of like you're a fly on the wall while he practices piano, and talks about the pieces he's working on.

I was 3rd row from the front. Perfect view of the keyboard and his hands. I was laser focused on what he was doing. Then after a while I forgot where I was and fell into the music so deeply that when I came out it was like waking up / sobering up.

You'd be able to relate. Once you know music, theory, and how it's made it becomes hard to enjoy music... like truly enjoy music without trying to reverse engineer what's going on. This was like listening to a quantum computer, I was overwhelmed.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by StN

So apparently the Ninja Creami is the best thing since sliced bread for making ice cream and gelato. And you can freeze protein powder and make non-fat cream freeze?

Googles availability.

Nope, none in NZ..

FYI they're back in stock apparently ...

[StN]

Originally Posted by Savage

FYI they're back in stock apparently ...

Sweet - I had one tee'd up from Amazon Au (might still go that route with free delivery etc).

[StN]

Originally Posted by Ab

...got on FB and asked her followers what she should do. Just before her phone died and she got raped and murdered.

...and that's the mass of data we are training GPT AIs with.

In a quiet office, Tim Berners-Lee facepalms.

[StN]

A rando post on Reddit has exposed the secrets of the universe.

This. This is how they get the $2 back...

Originally Posted by Reddit

Interested to hear peoples perspectives/advice on this - I’ve just returned to NZ temporarily for my Dads funeral, and wanted to buy a $40 prepaid data bundle from OneNZ.

At payment, the screen showed a negative $40 balance, which I was confused about but assumed might have been data costs I had accidentally incurred overseas, so I topped up $80. Lo and behold, they showed the negative balance as apparently there was a plan in my cart (didn’t see that anywhere at payment) and I now have $40 of credit in my account that I cannot use and will expire in 12 months (I won’t be back within 12 months).

I called OneNZ twice to get the surplus returned and they have stonewalled me twice, saying it’s “against their terms and conditions” to get a refund. Yet their conditions also state an exception “Conditions unless the connection is Active and the customer has made a double payment in error.”

I’m pretty upset about this as it’s the last thing I need considering my circumstances and feel like I’ve just been robbed $40 by a heartless and greedy telco. I’ve made a complaint to the telco ombudsman but beyond that feel pretty helpless.

[MadMax]

Losing money to OneNZ, next to playing lotto, is just another stupid tax.

[Cyberbob]

For the last few years I've been using excel to manage household expenses, but it's been a pain in the ass to manage over time, and I'd love to get some meaningful analytics out of it.
I'm starting to think about coding expenses like a business P&L general ledger, but it's such a hassle in excel.

Any free services out there that do it better than just me in excel?

[MadMax]

https://www.gnucash.org/features.phtml

[_indigo1]

GnuCash is complete trash IMO.
Horrible user interface. Difficult to manage. Just bad.

[Ab]

So it looks like eastern California, currently in a once-in-a-century drought, is about to receive multiple years worth of rain in the space of a day. I'm sure that won't cause problems.

[Ab]

You will either not care about this or you will freak the fuck out: a researcher at Istanbul University thinks he has discovered silphium growing in the wild in Turkey.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/h...s-ago-silphion (paywall)

https://greekreporter.com/2023/08/13...-rediscovered/

[MadMax]

Computer antivirus is no longer enough. You need to now be monitoring for otherwise ordinary processes that may be hoovering up all your data.

It’s trivial child’s play for someone to get into one machine then elevate themselves through to the rest of your network.

[Lightspeed]

Hb Savage.

[DrTiTus]

Happy birthday Savage

I got you an old Toyota ad because I noticed you didn't have one.

Enjoy your day G, doing whatever it is you do.

[Ab]

HB Sav

[wazza]

HB Lanius

[Savage]

Oh damn, thanks team 'Twas a great b'day spent with the folks/family for the first time in ages, and boy did Nelson turn on the weather for it

Many good calories consumed before going back to the iron dungeon this week

[Savage]

Originally Posted by DrTiTus

Happy birthday Savage

I got you an old Toyota ad because I noticed you didn't have one.

Enjoy your day G, doing whatever it is you do.

you bloody legend haha

[Lightspeed]

I really wonder how far this gets:

Vision 2030 is Saudi Arabia's grand plan to future-proof its oil-based economy. Experts say it's a huge risk.

I can't see how it gets completed.

[DrTiTus]

Python (pypy3, zoom zoom) vs C++ with -O3 -mavx512bw (AVX512 support and auto-vectorization) [CPU: Intel 11400F]



The same calculation, structured the same way (classes, overloaded operators as function calls, naive coding), but letting the C++ compiler optimize and use SIMD instructions (zero effort on my part). Single thread for fair fight.

Standard CPython (without pypy3), the 64x64 bit convolution was coming back with 769 per second, and I just cancelled it. What a joke. 131x slower. I was actually quite happy with pypy3 - getting a speedup of over 100x for free is pretty sweet. C++ is clearly even a lot better than that, but of course I had to rewrite my code.

I'll probably think C++ on CPU is shit once I get to CUDA or OpenCL doing everything hugely parallel, but that's for another day because I think I have to understand how to do the optimization myself.

[StN]

^^^^^ If you know CUDA, there is a job going that may leverage such skills.

[DrTiTus]

Thanks, since it says applicants should exercise discretion, I can neither confirm nor deny whether I will bother to apply for this role.

[wazza]

old mate in the role i now have left to go work for gcsb. i plan to follow but need a few more years doing what im currently doing

glhf