The "star of the show" is a Dell Inspiron 7620 2-in-1.

So my laptop battery dropped 10% more in 2 days?

So I did notice a drop in the battery performance over the past week or so. I used to be able to run it on battery for some 10 hours when watching local media, some 5-6 hours when using it normally over wifi, bluetooth, streaming, even doing some photo editing and such. Even with full brightness on in broad daylight doing stuff over wifi I could use it for some 5 hours.

Now? It's 4 or so hours when using it "normally". Dropped 1-2 hours on average. This is a bit extreme.

I wonder why...

For one this laptop is kinda hot most of the time. I have lots of things opened. So the temperature of the CPU/GPU is around 60-70 degrees on average. The laptop can be so hot it is uncomfortable to use it.

Second, I have charged this laptop via a USB-C dock that delivers 60W to the laptop, while normally the charger delivers 65W. I've read that this should not impact the battery life, but idk....

Lastly, these stats about the total capacity of the battery cannot be that exact....it dropped 10% after I rebooted the laptop, but I normally only reboot it once a month or less, so maybe it showed the 93% capacity wrongly for the past month or more.

Anyway, if I would complain about this laptop I'd say:

• gets very hot
• the battery seems to lose capacity super fast
• the chassis of the laptop is "too sharp", more than you imagine, making it uncomfortable to handle; that chassis is also a bit bendy...makes some noises when you handle the laptop
• it is kinda heavy overall
• you have to solder something inside your laptop to make your trackpad work
• repairable on paper, but kinda terrible in practice...not comfortable to open this laptop and replace stuff

But hey, I still like it....is kinda thin, powerful, dual RAM slots, 4TB of SSD, amazing screen, good keyboard, great trackpad after you make it work; great port selection, good webcam, and the build quality is still quite good overall.

But fuck, I hate that the battery is getting so bad suddenly...

I ordered a laptop fan stand, to put my laptop on while I'm on my desk...and I'll try to charge it with a more powerful charger. I know there are "good practices" to preserve the battery like only keep it charged between 20% to 80% and so forth....but what's the point of having a laptop if I have to do it like that? I want to use this thing in a way that is comfortable for me.

Anyway. It is what it is....

This week I will release the documentary so I'll focus on that.

Fuck you battery! You cunt!

I donated my old laptop to a dear friend who also helps with the TROM project. I used this laptop for many years but I needed a more portable one and luckily others helped me buy a better one for myself. I am happy to know that my dear friend the laptop, that helped me make 80% of the TROM II documentary, and trom.tf, and tromcasts, tromjaro, and so many books, and so on, now has a new home :)

I too often see these in the town I live in:

BUT:

• We are incentivized to buy and buy and buy; every day bombarded with such messages. And thus people buy even when they don't have to.
• There is no sharing platform that is useful enough, or some place where you can put these things to then be repaired and shared with others.
• People have no time to take any initiative. If people had the time to get involved they can create all sorts of sharing platforms and places. Like for the place where I live: imagine if some people can have the time to take the stuff people put at the garbage bin, repair and clean, and have a central place in the town where anyone can pick that stuff.

So. Yeah, anyway, I am super happy I could send my laptop to someone who will likely make good use of. I have 1 more laptop and a tablet that I want to give to others. I don't like to have much stuff anyway. I will try to get more and more involved with this physical-stuff sharing in the future, like sharebay.org/ that's made by our friend Colin. I will try to share stuff on that website too after TROM II is released.

So, I like a lot Kdenlive and am proud to have used it fully for the TROM II documentary. I will praise it more when after the documentary is released. BUT.

Here's a very tiring and frustration situation for me: @Dima correctly pointed out that the interviews are mostly very darkish. An easy fix tho. But Sasha's recordings are over saturated and it just so happens that this girl has these pretty red cheeks (haha) when she is excited, stressed, or drunk. And her cheeks go on and off, from red to pale, for the hours of recordings that we did. To make her look natural I have to tune down just that one cheek. At Dima's advice I started to use masks in Kdenlive and almost frame by frame track her cheek and tune it down. Very time consuming, but seems to be worth it.

I color corrected this documentary so much I feel like passing out at this point.

Back to my frustration.

In Kdenlive if you add effects to main clips, and these clips are in the timeline, then it can so happen to have these clips DESTROYED in the timeline. Meaning, you have 1 clip say in your Kdenlive BIN. You add 100 parts from it into the timeline on different tracks. Now you edit that ONE clip in the BIN to tweak the colors and realize that 67 of the scattered clips in the timeline look like this:

And the only way to fix is to drag these clips to another track, if you have space left....and many clips have all sorts of stuff on top of them....

Imagine now checking the entire documentary tracks for such errors...

I feel like going insane. After working the entire day, now to get it all fucked.

Here's another fuckery that I get:

Truth is, you can't simply color correct in Kdenlive. You have to color correct then check your entire timeline for errors, then export and check what you exported again to make sure it did not render it badly.

For projects like TROM II, Kdenlive can be a massive pain in the ass.

And this was an issue for the past 2 years. I reported it countless of times....

Nothing annoyed me more than this color-fucking-correcting for this documentary...I wish I made it in black and white.

When I scream about how trade is the origin of most problems, some people think that I am crazy and I exaggerate. Well either read the thousands of pages I wrote so far or watch the tens of hours of videos that I made, or here's another clear example:

I and Sasha. Much love. Love love, you know. We are together for the past 3 or so years. All we want is to stay on this planet somewhere. Can we? The answer is no. It is yes. It is maybe. It is confusing. Is it any answer?

After going through the bullshit of the marriage ritual, and went to lawyers here in Spain and all that, we still didn't figure that out until today.

Ok so listen. If you want to be able to stay in Spain, 2 humans that is, one of you is a resident in Spain and an EU citizen, one an American citizen, here's what you have to do:

• Prove that you are together and you love each other.
• That's it. Now you can live here and we (Spain) will take care of you to make sure you won't end up in the streets, or doing bad things.

See how easy that was!?

Oh wait....that's just my imagination. Hold on. Hmmm....Sorry, actually no one cares if you love each other, can take care of yourself, or you are a good human. Sorry, that was a different planet.

On Earth here's what you need:

• Be "married" (the ritual) with a resident/citizen of Spain.
• The resident/citizen has to prove that they have a job for the past year (so at least a year contract) and make at least 1.000 Euros a month.
• A bunch of other IDs and documents.

OR:

• Does not matter if you are with someone or not, you just have to stay in Spain for 3 consecutive years. Illegally.
• Do not get into any sort of issues with the police.
• Get a criminal record from your country of origin.
• Do a course (at least 40 hours) for the local language, in our case a dialect....
• Get a job offer.
• A bunch of other documents.

Alright Planet Earth, I see you are so kind with your hoomans.

So, a tribe (say Spain) will give 0 fucks about love, relationships, health, being a good human and such. But they will give 100% to TRADE. If you TRADE in their tribe, that's all they need really. If you invest money into a tribe, guess what, they will let you in no problemos - see. How many rich fucks that have been in jail or did so many illegal things are traveling all around the world!? Countless.

Fuck the "morality, ethics", equality, human rights, being a good human, and all of that crap. Or being a Christian, a Muslim, a whateverthefuck. These do not matter in our society. All it matters is that TRADE.

SO. It's all about that trade, 'bout that trade... - sing with me!

One of the things I submitted for Peertube to implement is responsive embeds (and I also provided the solution - the code). I am so happy to see it implemented and working in Peertube!

Oh and ofc you can follow my website via RSS or email too - all links here tiotrom.com/follow/

Federated, RSS, Email. All easy. All useful.

How beautiful to see the internet working this way. That's how it should be. My WP Website can connect to my social Profile (Friendica), and vice-versa. They all have RSS feeds too. Awesome!

I want to thank again to people like @Michael Vogel @Hypolite Petovan @Tobias and the like who work on Friendica. I love it and we talk about it (and the whole fediverse) in the upcoming TROM II documentary.

tio

2017-05-11 20:22:46

NEW BLOG POST:

Home

Read it on my website (recommended):

tiotrom.com/

Or read it here:

TIO

^TIO

I wrote a big post about AI :) and I also found a never before seen video with the latest meeting of the tech bros who are scared about AI -

TROM

2023-04-01 15:53:06

AI is ASS

NOTE: This post contains many images and text formatting, if you do not see this via our Friendica page then please use this link to read it fully social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4…

Back in 2015 I wrote a book for TROM about humans and the machines they have created. It is called the Human Machine and you can read it here.

Back then it was one of the first hypes about A.I. And as you may know by now, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Back then Google and Apple started to promote their AIs: Google Now and Siri. You could talk to these bots and they will provide you a lot of answers from many different domains. Ask how many dogs are in the world, ask them to set up an alarm for you, how's the weather, you name it. It would integrate with a lot of apps and devices.

People were asking these bots existential questions like what is the purpose of life:

I remember the Google supercomputers generating these weird images and the news outlets calling them "machines dreaming". Meaning, how machines dream:

And that Pepper robot that you could talk to...

These came after a few years of another hype: the self driving cars that were about to revolutionize transportation. In the book Automated Autonomous World that I wrote for TROM in 2013 , I partially fell for that hype and wrote in a very non-skeptical way about them.

To be fair with my past-self, I was focused entirely on how in a saner society the tech-part of the world could look like. So I presented many prototypes and unproven tech. I talked about how we have to change the infrastructure for these to work, and so forth. However, what I did not realized as deeply, was how misleading the world is. You see I naively thought that the big tech companies may not exaggerate as much about their tech. I sourced their own claims from their own engineers. But 10 years later I could say for sure that the vast majority of the tech I showcased in that book, was BS. For the most part at least. That means, the words that came out of the mouths of these engineers and "specialists" that work for these big companies, were mostly crap. Marketing.

That book may be removed from TROM when we do a cleanup this month in preparation for the upcoming TROM II documentary.

Back to AI.

In 2016 I started to be more and more aware of how the tech world is full of bullshit and bullshitters. For that reason I chose to present tech that was already there, working, and when it was just in testing phases I would present it as such and link to scientific papers about that tech.

When it came to AI I already smelled the bullshit. The stupid fear that AI will take over the world, and all of that crap. But I said let's educate myself. And so I said the best way is to understand a bit how these things work. I took several courses and read a bunch of stuff. I learned how AIs can categorize objects:

How it interprets text and speech:

I learned how facial recognition works:

I looked at how AIs learn to play games, drive cars, do science research.

Of course I only scratched the surface of these since they are complex. But I got a solid understanding I think. I realized that these are Statistical Software. Added with a bunch of filters and rules. They are complex, cool, interesting, but nothing WOW in terms of how they work. I learned that data and computer power is what makes the difference. I realized how non-magical these AI look when you have a clue about how they work. The end result is mesmerizing only for those who have a very dim understanding of these pieces of software.

I then talked about how they compared to humans. And of course the conclusion was that AI is just a complex set of statistical software with filters and rules and a lot of data, and has nothing to do with either artificial or intelligence (whatever that means).

Of course there are some applications for these pieces of software that I touched upon in the book, but mainly it was a grotesque hype.

Anthropomorphizing

That's a new word that I learned while writhing this book. It means "to ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.).". That's what AI are mostly.

The present.

7 years later and the AI "revolution" has resurfaced again. This time it seems even more mesmerizing, although not so much for me. I fee like I've seen this before...

ChatGPT and the like, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, now they have different names and do similar things. They are fun to play with. Can create some weird images out of text, something I was showcasing in 2016 in another book about Language.

And the craze is starting again with people thinking these AIs will revolutionize the world, or will take over, and then no more jobs, no more artists, no more life. If you look again at how these work, they seem a lot less mesmerizing. The companies that push them use anthropomorphism to make them sound like they "think" and are like humans: neural nets, learning, hallucinating, and so forth. In fact they are still the same statistical machines that produce probabilities and that results in interesting outcomes.

Without going into specifics I recommend this funny video that explains the entire situation quite well: A.I. is B.S. ->>> ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=ro130m-f_y…

Also read through the sources of that video.

When I asked chatgpt about TROM I got this:

Which is not bad.
But when I asked who made TROM I got a very bad and totally wrong answer:

No idea who Catalin and Andrei are, but it is totally wrong. The project did not start as a research project, whatever the hell that means.

You see although it says some true things, it also says some entirely false things. Because this AI only knows how to put words together. Has no clue about anything else. And it will always produce well written sentences that can be totally wrong. Thus, this chatbot is entirely useless for factual information. And if you think it will get better and better, for one let's wait for that and then "hype" it, but second it may never be able to due to how it works (statistical prediction of what words go with what other words).

When I tell chatgpt that the project was not created by those two dudes, it invents new ones:

And so on it goes:

AI is ASS!

AI is actually Anthropomorphized Statistical Software, or ASS :)

We may find good uses for this ASS, maybe when they only rely on a main source of information like some specific research papers and provide exact quotes and sources. They are fun to play with for a bit tho. They may help us create more creative content or video/photo/audio effects. But "they" are as much as "they" as websites are "they". Depends what websites we are talking about. Same here, these ASS are diverse and made for a diverse set of purposes.

But what it is clear to me is that the HYPE is just that, a HYPE. Pushed by companies who want to make these ASS more appealing and sell them, by the bloggers and youtubers who jump on the hype train for clicks and views, by the media that does the same. Combine that with the fact that we live in a dumbed-down society where humans are just workers who have no time to learn/digest any of these things, and we are faced with an Idiotic society that has no clue about any of these.

Our trade based society is at fault here again, for incentivizing humans to hype these things all the time, in order to trade them. And for the fact that it keeps us all busy idiots for the sake of trading to survive. This has created a Land of Confusion.

Welcome to Earth.

#tromlive

a.i. is b.s.

A.I. is B.S.

SUPPORT ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/adamconover SEE ME LIVE ON TOUR: http://adamconover.net/tourdates VISIT USAFACTS: https://bit.ly/3TZyUK3 The real risk of A.I.

^{Adam Conover | Invidious}