No, not dead.
For starters. Happy New Year out there. We didn't do anything extravagant like go to a garage filled with video games or go to Illinois to visit a group of people that resent me. Nah! We just stayed home and played a little bit of System Shock. Be told how we're terrible people by a fictional AI named "Shodan". The article was originally supposed to come out in October but kinda stopped mid-writing on this.
I'd find a picture with Lesbians holding Guns. But we think us just saying it is enough to freak out the AI content filters. Beyond this, a lot of background work has been happening throughout my site. For starters:
Intel A380 article updated.
Looking back at this article, we felt like we didn't do a great job in making this article scientifically repeatable. Also, the findings were a little fucked up due to the nature of how VMAF operates. After a bit of tweaking, we have better quality values going through this process.
SSL has been updated on this site.
This marks our 12th year in running this site. It's been a hell of a ride from start to finish. And unless something totally fucked happens with WordPress/Automatic we probably won't be changing our infrastructure anytime soon. With the many years of working with the software, we have seen the blessings and curses of WordPress. We know enough to manipulate it in our way.
VS Contact form deleted:
What we will be changing however is the removal of the online contact form. Which we were receiving almost a thousand e-mails daily from the same scam which goes a little something like this:
Mark T
lan.hammond@k***t.com
Potential Partnership
Hi,
I came across your website and noticed that your current logo design has potential for improvement.
I'd love to offer you my services to help refine your brand identity and make it stand out in the competitive.
I'm committed to providing personalized service to ensure that you're fully satisfied with the final product.
If you're interested in discussing further, chat with me here : https://rebrand.ly/CrappyDesignerHere.
Or if you know any other people who might be interested, please forward it to them.
Thanks for considering my services.Regards,
mark
This kind of e-mail is the cold call sales of AI designers. Where if you click on their link, you will be magically taken over to a Fiver account where a face from ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com offering graphic design services, which will more than likely go through a GPT prompt to produce and spit back out at you. This circles into those YouTube dirtbags telling people how to make easy money with GPT and LLM based technology, which instead of feeding actual creative people is going off to machines that will slowly plunge us into a new electrical dark age.
Multiply this e-mail by several thousand at the end of the week and well. It's time to shut down the contact form once and for all.
You can't really get the admins of Fivver involved because they'll use the bullshit excuse that the link doesn't go to their site. Which is true! It goes to rebrand, which THEN goes to Fivver. Even if you did manage to shut one down. Irrelevant. It's practically filled with thousands more.
I could increase the complexity of the forum before submission. But we had to sit back and consider the overall value of the submission form. In respects that for every few thousand spam messages we received. Only one actual legitimate message came through. So the value simply isn't there.
Now, we're not closing off ways for people to contact us entirely. There's still manual e-mail which most actual legit users understand and can send mail this way versus the contact form. Finally, our Pleroma Instance is still very much running as well.
It wouldn't matter changing to a different contact form software because at the end of the day. Unless you change your field values, incredibility. It's simply not worth the risk.
The new year's blog article we forgot to make.
We're guilty of doing this in the past. The concept that there has to be some omen every blogger must do to sum up the new year's and to bring forth what they're doing next year.
That shot legit looks like it came out of a 1980s film.
Because the writers of "2025: The movie" wanted to start things off extra spicy. Perhaps it's best that we didn't do anything for a New Year's Eve party. In fact, this pivots to our new commitment for 2025.
Live.
That's right. We're going to try not to die in 2025. Seems like a reasonable goal, right? Despite the cost of living jumping thirty percent and the only reason why is "Everyone else is doing it" we're certainly not on the trajectory for the Star-Trek or even Blade Runner futures! But right on track with movie "Idiocracy". Even though that film was a sci-fi comedy. It's quickly becoming a documentary for all the wrong reasons!
Blog articles will continue to come out whenever we feel like it. Combined with periodic articles like this one to confuse and disorient our LLM overlords that want to brown-out countries with obscene power usage.
Luddite.
In many cases we feel like we have become Luddites. Now, historically these are people who sabotaged textile plants not because of the automation but the thought process behind that automation. To the Luddite the machinery to make their job better/faster is great, that should also mean that people who run those machines will be paid better. Right? To the business owners of those textile plants, it means they can make more product without paying for labor. There-by bottoming out the entire industry. When every avenue of reconciliation has been used or denied from government control to protests. Sometimes going vigilante is the only path or else be destroyed yourself.
It sucks ass when history repeats itself.
When you look around at the tech industry on how every major cooperation wants to cram their sad definition of artificial intelligence down your throat. It's because all of these tech firms bought into the technology companies like Nvidia promised and if you don't want to use their AI. They will make you use their AI by force in an effort to make money. If you applied the business practices, the tech industry is using to anything in the outside world. This would come very close to rape. We won't ask you for permission to install this product. We're pushing our will upon you because we know you wanted this, and you're too dumb to say otherwise. If you didn't want this, then you should've had installed the Operating System or purchased the Phone. Because you did buy it, you're begging for us to do this to you.
Not sure if this will be the final straw where everyone jumps to Linux. Probably not. Incremental shit doesn't make people freak out until said cooperation ends up killing off your loved ones and the lawyer is telling you that you cannot sue as you signed an arbitration agreement for Disney+. But as of late it's been the direction we've been going. We've been developing the habit of using the corporate OS for work purposes. But when it comes time for home activity although it still kinda sucks from the gaming aspect. Linux will probably be my daily driver soon.
Until nest time.
Server protect you.
-S
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