Thank God.

 

It was a real nail biter.

#OrangeManBad beat the steal in an historic win. I am so relieved I can't even tell you.

Next up, Canada throws off the Chinese Communist yoke and ditches the #ShinyPony. Incoming in 3, 2, ...

Looking north, toward Ottawa...

9/11

 

The one guy fighting for those who died on 9/11.

NaNoWriMo loves AI tools? Are you kidding me?

Actual robot, actually writing.

NaNoWriMo is in the news again, and not in a good way. Again.

The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is being slammed online after it claimed that opposing the use of AI writing tools is "classist and ableist."

Not content to rest on their child-grooming laurels, NaNoWriMo has decided to piss off the writing community more by not only allowing AI tools to be used but releasing a statement that not allowing AI tools is double-plus ungood. From their statement:

We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege. 

• Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.

• Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers "should" be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't "see" the issues in their writing without help. 

• General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don't always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.

Now, leaving aside the leftist balderdash about "upfront cost burdens" and "abelism" (which I'm sorry Lefties is not a freaking word), the oh-so-moral people at NaNoWriMostudiously ignore the sad truth that getting ChatGPT to barf out a bunch of paragraphs for you is not writing.

NaNo is supposed to be a writing contest. Where you -write-.

Arguably AI is techno-assisted plagiarism, and I do not appreciate the various tech companies scraping my books on Amazon for fodder to feed their large language models. Given AIs are used in professional environments to make money, I'd appreciate a tiny pittance of recompense for my contribution to their profits, thank you very much. Absent them paying me for what I've done, I'm against it. Because it's stealing. For the Leftists out there who need things spelled out, stealing is bad.

Apart from the unpaid plagiarism, given the realities of publishing these days I'm not against the use of AI tools in a professional environment. You need fast research, you need 1500 words about corsets and you know you'll never get more than ten bucks for it, AI is your friend. You need a book cover and you know your book is never going to make more than a hundred bucks, Photoshop and AI generative fill all the way, baby. Money is money. I use it for covers, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But for a writing contest? This is the same thing as using an e-bike in a bicycle race vs. riding it to work. Fine, it isn't against the rules, but did you really compete? Or did the bike compete and you just sat on it and waved to the spectators? A stupid concept, in my humble opinion, and I speculate that it could be cover for some financial kickback or other skulduggery. A pox upon them, and all their houses.

For the Usual Suspects, this is a different issue than the ridiculous conduct of the Dragon Awards. You can't ret-con rules and quietly disqualify nominees because somebody made a fuss about AI, and most particularly you can't do it under cover of darkness, by stealth. One of these things is not like the other, you Commie pukes.

Day after: questions.

Yesterday, as we all know by now, one 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, PA missed killing Donald Trump by maybe a quarter inch. Given what we've seen from the videos, and there's a literal photo of the bullet flying past him, another quarter inch to the left would have killed him. No need to go into gory details, I'll just leave it at that.

Leaving us all with some questions.

My first question, at what point does official incompetence become something more sinister? We already know eye-witnesses told police Crooks was on that roof easily two to three minutes before he took the shot. We already have pictures of him lying there lining up his shot, being given all the time in the world, only 150yards from the podium. How is that reasonable? Are they really that lame?

No, they're not. This is a special case, IMHO sitting here behind my keyboard with my gatorade. They can't be that lame by accident, is my thought. Somebody degraded Trump's Secret Service detail, and somebody did a bunch of site planning to get Crooks on that roof. He didn't stumble on the idea while driving by with a ladder and a rifle in his truck. Maybe Crooks planned it himself, but does that seem likely?

My second question, at what point do we all admit that this is a Leftist political policy? They've been demonizing Trump since 2016, they did it to Bush Sr. and Jr., they did it to Regan. The media has been trying to brainwash Thomas Matthew Crooks and every other 20 year old in the country SINCE THE 1980s!!!! And now here we are. There's a bunch more like him out there, primed and ready to pop. All you have to do is watch tiktok today, they're screaming it. Hundreds of them. It's a fucking social movement by now, not a lone-wolf deal.

Final question, well, you missed boys. What's next? Whatcha gonna do? Send some more useful idiots to whack the Republican presidential nominee? Release the hounds to burn some cars? I don't think you're winning this time. Joke's over.

Fire up the corporate jets and flee, is my advice. Cuba is nice, or so I hear. Decent beaches, right? Di di mau, baby.

Uppitydate: Here we are on the 17th, and it seems the shooter was fucking around with that rifle on the roof for quite some time in plain view of everybody. I heard one estimate that it was over 20 minutes. Certainly more than five.

What this means is that Trump's security detail LEFT HIM OUT THERE for a long time when they could plainly see a guy on that roof where he was not supposed to be. Okay, they didn't want to shoot the guy, but they couldn't get Trump off the stage? Shooter on the roof, in plain fucking sight, of everybody, and they left their guy standing on the stage like a perfect target?

There was time for a cop to RUN over to Trump and get him off the stage. Like, lots of time. Time for a coffee and a donut, and the fat guy could still run over.

Just looking at that, I'm going to say that somebody needs to go to jail here. Starting with the site commander, and whoever gave that moron the job.

from the "Military Intelligence is a contradiction" files: German Navy seeks replacement for 8" floppy drives.

In case anyone ever wonders how bad tempered, militant, conservative-minded, traditionalist Phantom came to hate the Canadian military at age 17, and continues to hold the world-wide military as a whole in contempt to this day, an example.

The German Navy is searching for a new storage system to replace the aging 8-inch (20cm) floppy disks which are vital to the running of its Brandenburg class F123 frigates. According to an official tender document, the ideal answer to the German Navy's problems would be a drop-in floppy disk replacement based upon a storage emulation system, reports Golem.de. Germany's Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium. These drives are part of the frigates' data acquisition system and, thus "central to controlling basic ship functions such as propulsion and power generation," according to the source report.

A tiny bit of background for those of you under 60, the eight inch floppy disk (8") was current computer technology in the 1970s. Introduced for mini-computers in 1971 by IBM, carried 500K of data, and it was popular. Eventually discontinued in favor of the 5.25" and later the 3-1/2", by the 1980s just in time for PCs. Here's a website that some guy put up about playing with 8" drives.

So the German fricking navy standardized on 8" floppies in the late 1970s and never changed it for 50 years? Oh no. It is -much- worse than that.

Germany's Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium. These drives are part of the frigates' data acquisition system and, thus "central to controlling basic ship functions such as propulsion and power generation," according to the source report.

Their frigates were built in the 1990s with tech from the 1970s that was already wildly, horribly obsolete. For which spare parts have not been made for 30 years, because they were already past end-of-life when the ship was built. Every computer on that boat, taken together, could be replaced with a single Apple iWatch. You could run the whole thing from your phone, and still be able to watch cat videos on YouTube.

But the worst part is that for-sure the engineers all knew that very well when the thing was built, and they fucking well did it anyway.

Later in the article it is revealed that the American Strategic Air Command system ran on 8" floppies until they finally fixed it in 2019. You know, the guys that babysit the nukes? Yeah.

I can only imagine the shit that's lurking in the Canadian military, still running on IBM and DEC big iron boxes from the 1970s.

And that, my friends, is why I hold the Western military as a whole in contempt. They are lazy, short-sighted, corrupt, and above all, they are stupid. I can only imagine the freak show that the Chinese and Russian military is.

Trump/#Brandon debate in a nutshell.

 https://x.com/JerseyBillz/status/1806513100834656286

Dana Bash signals #Brandon who he should be looking at. That's the most perfect encapsulation of this wretched farce I've seen. 

I am beyond disgusted today. This plastic banana has been propped up in that office since 2020. What the actual fuck.

IT HAS BEGUN.

Choose your fighter!

The blazing red Liberal riding of Toronto-St. Paul, the very heart of darkness, housing the absolute highest concentration of the absolute dumbest fucktard Liberals in the entire nation... is now a Conservative seat.

The Normies have awoken.