DevDave

Not too much to research with the blinding lasers needed. Keep in mind I am not any where near an expert but this seems like a sufficient implementation. I am 100% certain someone smarter and or more experienced than me could potentially simplify this further.

A sufficiently high resolution video camera with fast integrated auto focus on a mechanized cradle, a computer with two RTX 4090’s, and of course a class IV (say 100w) laser with dual rotating mirrors should be enough to permanently blind the bulk of a crowd.

I bet there is a free model on hugging face for identifying the pupils for eye tracking and there are facing tracking models to drastically cut down the area for acquiring targets. Really the hardest part could be the camera but if you have enough money, Hollywood has stuff that would work. Other problem would be running the models fast enough to be effective.

Casing could just be a metal box that rotates and has a quartz glass window coated with hydrophobic chemicals.

They can’t make it to obvious this is the bad place.

Ugh, I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like being on a cruise ship full of norovirus.

While I am not a big fan of sailing and such, I am one of those rare assholes that absolutely doesn’t get sea sick. That said, being surrounded by vomit and shit everywhere would probably be enough to overcome that mild superpower.

Well there was that time an aircraft carrier was taken off the line because of rona, so not too hard to imagine how it would go.

Also the whole “man flu” thing is actually real. Testosterone has been shown to weaken parts of the immune system - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5075254/

“Alright so this system is called ‘testing’ but you need to get two seniors to sign off plus a good reason to push an update.”

/What about this system?/

“Oh, that’s where we do all are actual testing, just be careful not to break it too much.”

/Alright, what is it called?/

“Uhm, I think its called prod or something like that. The root password is written on a sticky note on the upper right corner of John’s monitor.”

/Who is John, the senior dev or something?/

“What? Hahaha no, John is just the summer intern.”

A really rough way for Americans to understand these prices is to take the liters/$ price and multiply it by 4. So my friend in Greece who pays 2,22 a liter is actually paying close to $8 a gallon.

More accurate would be 3.73 or about, but 4 is good enough.

not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

Consider the ages of those involved, they will be long dead of natural causes by the time the true “find out” stages of climate change has really gotten going. Also they’ve got wealth & privilege so will have the easiest time migrating to safer places.

Even now, Phoenix Arizona is still another 3 years, at least, away from when evacuations will need to start while Vegas has maybe another 8 as long as the deeper water lines work as designed. Miami could defy the somewhat impossible odds and survive another decade before a hurricane wipes it out like Andrew did to Homestead. Yes bad things are starting to happen faster now, but we could have had another decade of some semblance of normalcy.

When I was younger, I worked exclusively on a v220 (best of the worst) Unix terminal using vi to write programs in c/c++. Yeah I got a little fancy near the end of that with three separate terminals, but the point was I also had memorized an absolutely ridiculous amount of information starting at the syntax rules for four somewhat related languages (bash, c, c++, and whatever the fuck makefile’s are) plus hundreds if not thousands of functions in c and c++ without needing to consult documentation or rely on autocomplete to fill in the blanks.

30+ years later I have a command palette tool I absolutely depend on along with degraded typing skills that show whenever I have to type something out completely like a peasant.

A bit more than a year ago this (https://www.understandingai.org/p/metas-llama-31-can-recall-42-percent) was discussed quietly with the question “If an llm was trained on stolen source code from say Microsoft and then later regurgitates an exact part of that code, what is the legal status of that output?” Where exactly is the threshold where it becomes theft by proxy? Is it a large c struct with matching names and typed properties? Or does it need to be an entire header/definition file pair like with c++ .h and .cpp?

On a more humorous note, a lot of people are half seriously talking about de-compiling NVIDIA’s drivers, running that through more than a couple LLM’s to clean it up, and then when it can compile and works, publish that as open source. Most want to see what the green machine and leather jacket man will do.