This will be an unusual challenge for you. I'm intrigued which angle you'll try to guess my age from.

I learned it from ancient Orkney technology called "sauna". 😉

What it does is trigger your parasympathetic nervous system (or maybe the sympathetic, I always lose track of which does what). And yes, that makes blood vessels constrict and dilate and I just find that it enervates me and makes me feel really good.

I'll try taking a shot after such a shower and report back. 🤣

Yeah, I got it because the price was incredibly low, so if it's usable at all it's a bonus.

And it's actually very usable. I just think the gold chrome plastic pieces are a bit naff.

But for $1.40? HELL yeah! I'm in.

I have a shower as warm as I can to open all my pores and clean them out.

Then I slam the water all the way to the coldest possible and force myself to stay under it for two minutes.

That's a huge wake-up call.

There are several problems with this report.

The Line Doesn't Go Up

As others have pointed out, this implies that Tesla (and to a significantly lesser extent his other enterprises) continues its valuation increase at the current rate. This is not going to happen. Indeed looking just at this graph should show that this is unlikely:

The 2024-09-16 close isn't even the highest of the past 52 weeks, not to mention the highest of all time (which is c. 2021-11-05). (It isn't even the highest close of the past 30 days—or of even the past 5 days!) It is, in fact, 55-56% of the all-time high, and that was almost three years ago.

And the pattern of its financials will prevent that line from going up:

See, most investors invest not because they're cult members (like the fanboi day traders Apartheid Manchild grifts so well) but because they expect to see ROI. And the fundamentals of Tesla are not showing ROI potential.

So the line isn't pointing up.

Stock Valuation Is Fantasy

And on top of this, this is all "paper wealth". All of the Manchild's stocks and five bucks buys you a small coffee at Starbucks. To actually buy more than that small coffee at Starbucks (ideally without an extra five bucks handed to him) the Manchild would have to cash in those stocks. And when he starts selling stock, the stock value will drop. The more he sells, the faster it will drop. That stock bonanza he has is not cash and its valuation is purest fantasy. It's points for score-keeping, not something you can actually spend.

Basically the only thing you can spend are "liquid assets" and most of Apartheid Manchild's assets are not liquid (which is why he had to borrow to buy Xhitter). Attempting to liquidate them will drop their value like a concussed bee.

Apartheid Manchild is a Moron

Apartheid Manchild is not the Tony Stark of Real Life like he seems to think he is. He is a guy who started rich and fell upwards. His most valuable company is not one he founded. It's one he paid for the right to be called the founder of. He didn't invent electric cars. He didn't invent reusable rockets. He didn't invent much of anything, in fact. He has 29 patents to his name. Compare and contrast with James Dyson¹ and his almost 550 patents. The most cited of his patents (with 202 citations) would be #10 on Dyson's list of influential patents. How about a more recognizable name: Sergey Brin at 141 patents.

And when you look at Apartheid Manchild's actual patents, the 9 that are actually currently active (9 have expired, and 10 are pending) are singularly unimpressive for such a "world class genius". Again Dyson will eat his lunch for sheer volume of practical patents, as will Brin (who himself looks like a playing toddler next to Dyson).

Yet if you listen to the Manchild, he is the leading expert on everything that Trump isn't the leading expert on. He's the leading expert on logistics (says the man who has chronic supply problems). On manufacturing (says the man whose cars frequently have major quality issues). On electric cars (says the man whose cars are beginning to look positively quaint next to the competition's). On robotics. On AI. On rockets. On ...

And he's not an expert in anything. Except falling upward in a system whose feedback loops guarantee that once you crack a certain level of cash you fall upward.

This is unsustainable, and once it stops sustaining, his net worth will fall like so many wealthy idiots before him. The higher he sails on the crack of his quisling's praise, the harder and faster his inevitable fall will be.

Apartheid Manchild is His Own Worst Enemy

As a special case of being a moron, a few years back Apartheid Manchild was something that you could kind of find adorable if you had a certain personality type. He seemed like the bumbling nerd made good. Further his fiction of the self-made billionaire tackling the Big Names with gumption and talent is the kind of stuff the American (Opium) Dream is made of. If he'd kept his mouth shut and kept himself out of the spotlight he might not be in the pickle he's found himself in now.

But he has too large an ego for that, and a serious grudge against the world to nurse.

So instead he mouthed off on Twitter. Then he trapped himself into having to buy Twitter for waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much. Then he turned Twitter into an echo chamber to amplify his real personality.

And his real personality is repugnant to most people.

He is damaging the Tesla brand. He is damaging the SpaceX brand despite the herculean efforts of Shotwell and co. He has a long string of business failures behind him that are making people think he isn't the genius he claims to be. And all of this is going to negatively impact his wealth.

So he won't ever be a trillionaire.

---

¹ Who? Exactly my point.

Why do the techbrodudes always read dystopian literature and view it as a model, not a warning?

And the idiot is selling this as something GOOD!?

Just execute every LLM researcher. They're going to destroy civilization if left unchecked.

I'd reward you with an elephant ear sandwich for this joke, but I'm fresh out of those giant buns.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/profit

Time to brush up on your vocabulary a little, Sparky. Definition 3.

You don't play D&D. You don't use AI. But you're in a thread about AI being used for D&D.

This makes you either one of the JAQing off assholes or a liar.

Which is it?

"Profit" doesn't have to mean in cash.

But it is very telling that this is what you reach for.

Say "I am not any kind of artist" without using those words.

Ah. OK, wholesale infringement of the works of others is A-OK as long as you use it for your personal profit.

Yes. Wholesale infringement of the works of others so that you can turn a profit is a great thing! I can't see anything that could possibly go wrong there!

That's the one!

I found an '80s show that I somehow completely missed: "Sledge Hammer!" I don't know how I missed this show, but I've binged it now.

Degenerative AI has not led to any of that propulsion advance, etc. That's "machine learning", not LLM.

Nobody is disputing the value of non-LLM (non-degenerative) AI. It's the degenerative AI that's utterly and fucking useless for anything except burning down rainforests.

It hasn't dripped yet, and I haven't used it enough to answer that fraying question.

https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-fountain-brush.html

A whole bunch to select from there.

I'm in China, so I'd be using it for Chinese calligraphy. When I get around to learning it.

A "virus" is now "any program that doesn't work"?

All programs are viruses!

I guess I was the sucker that just learned to write.

Or, you know, I could just search for the links.

All ChatGPT adds to the equation now is burning down a rainforest or ten.

Which is absolutely hilarious to me given how often it hallucinates answers.

I recently tried ChatGPT as a Google alternative. It looked very impressive as it found things based on the slightest of clues. Except that literally everything it found was made up. It "found" a movie quote by Orson Welles that was never quoted. It "found" a song by an artist that said artist never released. It "found" an album by a group released four years before said group's first release.

If you're using ChatGPT as a Google replacement you are being dangerously misinformed by a degenerative "AI" that speaks with the certitude of a techbrodude.

I genuinely did not know that! 😵

This reminds me of a similar factoid.

Did you know that if you took the entire Pacific salmon catch and laid it out nose to tail across the Sahara desert…

…the stench would be overpowering!

OpenAI stays alive the same way Farcebook stays alive, Goober stays alive, Xhitter stays alive, etc. etc.

Flat-out grifting.

I solve #1 with some very fine grit whetstones. Any time I have a pen I like whose nib is just a bit too scratchy I use a 4000-grit ruby whetstone to shape it,then a 10,000-grit or better one to polish it. I've managed to rescue some nibs that were constantly shaving strand of paper off a writing surface.

A bit of Korean and Chinese punk. A smattering of Chinese grunge. Some Malaysian Buddhist music. Some Taiwanese Buddhist death metal (no, really!).

I definitely have to get a retractable fountain pen to try out. These look sort of nifty.

Perhaps you may wish to look up "anecdote" vs. "data" sometime.

No. Hot dogs are repulsive.

… how is a free service supposed to be sustained?

That seems to me to be a powerful argument against "free" services. Because there's no such thing. Not even:

Free only works if it’s offline/self-hosted and open source IMO.

"Self-hosted" isn't free. You have to pay for the hosting site one way or another, even if it's on your property. (Those bandwidth fees? That's payment.)

I’ll bring an example of a subscription service that still hasn’t enshittified: Mullvad VPN. It’s still a fiver a month and you can’t pay extra for extra functionality. It just always costs the same.

What are the trade-offs associated with it? It was made in 2009. Fifteen years later it hasn't changed its prices, even as everything around it (including its network fees) has increased? Colour me a little … dubious.

Have you considered, then, the possibility that you should be on something?

I'll rent you mine. 🤣

Today. I rolled a beer can on the first try onto the highest-payback patch on a mat. I won a six-pack.

OK, not really impressive, but I did surprise a few people around me who never landed on any payback patches after three tries each.

Time to sharpen the blades and oil the tracks of the guillotines.

There is technology available now that is truly horrific in its implications should people with sufficient imagination and a whole lotta fucks not to give start putting thought into it. I've workshopped a few possibilities with my SO (an electronics engineer). Here's the two best:

Example 1: Lazy Dog Drones

A commercial cargo drone can be picked up for a song and a dance when compared to even a tiny malcontent terrorist cell's budget. It is trivial to build a metal box with racks that can be opened and emptied by remote control. It is also trivial to manufacture a bunch of lazy dogs to put into said drone's box. Now you just need a cheap rustbucket pickup truck and a canvas tarpaulin and you're ready to go.

Park your truck somewhere without straight line-of-sight surveillance. Uncover your drone in the back. Launch it and fly nap-of-the-earth until you're a distance away and then go for altitude. Fly to wherever there's a crowd of people you don't mind killing and maiming. When overhead (about 30m) and going at full speed, release the lazy dogs. While this is going on you relocate your truck (in case someone saw the launch). Have the drone fly off nap-of-the-earth to land in your truck. Cover the drone with your tarp and leave. Reload with lazy dogs and repeat at will until you're out or until you're caught.

An amazing number of lazy dogs can be held in a box that even a relatively modestly-priced cargo drone can carry with ease. Imagine the carnage one of those would have evoked had the Las Vegas shooter used it instead of relatively ineffectual rifle fire. (Yes, I'm calling the worst mass shooting in American history "relatively ineffectual" by comparison to a single load of lazy dogs.) And even better (from his perspective) he wouldn't have had to put himself at risk while gleefully slaughtering hundreds.

Example 2: Laser Blinders

You can get very strong lasers for under $500. The kind that will blind you in milliseconds if aimed at your eyes. You can buy servo kits that can be controlled by a microcomputer for well under $100. The kinds of microcomputers you'd need for this little toy are fairly pricey, though. About $50. (No, I'm not joking. My SO has a kit with an "SoC", whatever that is, that is more than capable of pulling off this attack.) Add about another $300 for assorted optics (a camera, some lenses, etc.) and you're ready to rock.

This system will be a small turret, in effect, that aims that laser. A camera will be used both to identify targets and to shift the laser's position around to ensure the target is appropriately struck. In Phase I you decide who your target is and train an AI model (not Degenerative AI but still Deep Learning AI) on that target. You could decide you want to attack white folk, say, or police officers, or politicians, or … I don't know, street sweepers? … whatever crazy sociopaths want to attack. For professions, you spend some time in advance doing things like scouring police web sites for faces, or have some people in the field taking surreptitious pictures of street sweepers. For racial types, it's easy to buy image sets that are already nicely categorized for you so you can just go wild. In the end you have training data that will with reasonable accuracy identify your targets. The turret is set up somewhere hard to notice and set to running. It identifies targets based on its training data through the camera, then brings the laser roughly to bear on the target. The laser is fired very briefly—far too quickly for the human eye to detect—at lower power and the camera identifies where the spot was and adjusts the turret. When it's on target (a process that takes under a second … by far) it fires full strength, destroying the target's vision (likely cooking the eyes!) before the target can even process what's going on.

On a crowded street it can do this with impunity for quite a while before people understand what's happening around them. And there would be no real escape if you're one of the targets if the terrorists put up two or three of these turrets to set up a kill zone with no angle uncovered. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people could wind up horribly blinded and tracing the attack to specific individuals could be fiendishly difficult given that most of the components are off-the-shelf.

And remember…

This is technology we have right now. This isn't some far future thing where we have better and more powerful computers and other technology. One of the reasons I can't get into cyberpunk gaming is that the world presented is … charmingly backwards compared to what the world is now.

I just tried asking perplexity.ai about that and … SURPRISE! … it said it wouldn't help me do something "unethical" (because apparently destroying an unethical system is unethical).