You are comparing yourself to others, rather than looking to Jesus for guidance. You practice your faith performatively, and are devoid of any real spiritual motivation. See also: "holier-than-thou." And Romans 14:13-14:15.

Hahaha this guy has been shitting up every board pretending to be from /christian/ and the moderation doesn't do shit. At least they aren't /fascist/ right guys :^)

>>2240 I don't see any need to moderate a few low-effort posts, especially ones that aren't breaking the rules (this is the thread for off-topic discussion, after all). At most, this guy is just the latest cross-board shitposter everyone will forget about in a few months.

>>2241 It beats the plague of /monster/fags advertising this place on 4chan and shilling discord links while they shit up every board with vtranny drama.

>>2240 It's clearly a mohammadean falseflag, faggot.

>>2242 That is a thing that happens? Why, though? I have no idea what /monster/ is, by the way. Also, discord in general should burn.

>>2241 I am a gay mohammadean troll

Got a '76 Volvo 244 (manual, with overdrive) in pretty nice shape. Original paint and the clear coat is not failing. Going to baby this thing forever if I can. And store it in a garage through midwestern winter salt hell. Hopefully the K-jetronic fuel system will be okay with that.

Also saw this while out and about; remembered you, commie.

>>2233 AT&T's descent into utter irrelevance is unfortunate. Once on the forefront of Unix, they've now even abandoned their prized dividend security by merging their only profitable division into Discovery. The entire company seems to exist now solely for the purpose of trying to sell me DirecTV (completely undeterred by the fact that I do not even own a television and never will). >>2235 >are more in line with Jesus's teachings than what many Christians today practice Churches are now, and have always been, houses of sinners seeking salvation. That is the entire point, and so it has always confounded me that atheists look to Christian 'hypocrisy' as a gotcha. I am no more surprised to see Christians on their third marriage than I would be to find relapsing alcoholics at an AA meeting. >If there is a god, I would hope that god cares more about actions than words. I do agree. >>2238 >I want it to be because my philosophy has led me there, rather than because someone else says I should. I recommended once (and you can't stop me from doing again) City of God by Augustine of Hippo. If you are looking for philosophical arguments rather than modern evangelizing, look no further than the book that influenced the entirety of the Middle Ages. On the topic of that YouTube video, Genesis had a great song about modern evangelicalism called 'Jesus He Knows Me'. Really catchy lines about toll free numbers and the like. >You seem to use religion to form notions of you versus the heretics Nu-Christianity has become a shibboleth for the Very Online right, in the same token that 'folks', 'violence', or 'uterus havers' are for the Very Online left. Whether by the trappings of religion or inclusivity, meanings become obfuscated through word choices that serve no other purpose than to signal to the reader the author's leanings on social issues. In going through several months of emails today, I decided I'd had enough of one lad who had taken up what I can only describe as 'ironic Christianity.' I have no desire to read anything written by someone who refers to people as 'my brother in Christ' yet has never even seen a bible in his lifetime. >>2251 >K-jetronic fuel system If you really like the car, replace that with a modern fuel injection system. The K-Jetronic is an alien system that no one will touch, and few parts are available for. It is probably the most fragile part of that entire car, and half the reason older Mercedes sell for under $5k. But if you ever have to work with it, check out the BenzWorld forum. The K-Jetronic was used in a variety of Mercedes models for over a decade, and its various problems and solutions are well documented there. >>2252 Lovely; someone really knows what they have there. But I would have to say that my favorite Merc would be something in the W126 line. I settled on the W140 largely because I can't imagine anything from the 80's being a worthwhile daily driver unless I was prepared to spend a thousand dollars on parts every time I came home from the grocery store.

>>2255 that must be why gnu is the only one still using that backwards ass at&t syntax

>>2255 >pic kek'd >City of God by Augustine of Hippo Do you have a specific book/volume of that you recommend starting out with above the others?

>>2267 Humans exist to satisfy their needs and wants. There is no greater purpose to live. Indulge, work, and die. Inevitably there will be no need for work.

>>2267 I don't think I'll ever understand just what the fuck happened to the trollface meme over the past few years.

Good evening, all. Hope everyone had a fine summer. >>2261 Some volumes may be more relevant to your particular perspective and troubles, but I cannot recommend one over another to a person. The work as a whole is worthy of much reflection, and is perhaps second only to Colonel Hackworth's About Face on my list of recommendations. >>2267 Consider the man who eats fast food daily. Enjoyment turns into addiction and dependence, and worse still - tolerance. The fast food addict no longer derives any enjoyment from his meals, and sees them only as yet another part of his routine. And where one meal might have satisfied him at the start, he now needs one order of this, another of that, an extra large something in his search for satiety. A single cheeseburger would leave him yearning for more. We recognize that too much fast food has dire consequences on the individual because we can see the results manifest in the form of physical obesity. But pornography too yields similar results in the form of moral obesity; degrading the value of human interaction and dulling the fulfillment of actual relationships. You need only spend a few minutes on Discord or other rubbish to find porn-addicted men who could never interact with a woman in a healthy manner, and who view nearly everything through a lens of pornographic desire and loneliness. And where the fast food addict requires ever more greasy garbage, the alcoholic ever more to drink - the porn addict requires ever more taboo content. Simple nudity would never suffice for the porn addict, nor would videos of actual sex anymore. Instead the porn addict begins to seek out increasing taboos (anal, gang-bang, erotic torture, piss, bestiality, cuckolding, raceplay, chastity, sissification, etc). Individuals convicted of possessing/distributing child sexual abuse material most commonly use the excuse of eventually 'running out' of other material that could get them off sufficiently. Through thousands of years of human lives come and gone, the one constant found has been that moderation of joy leads to contentment with life, and indulgence leads to misery. Whether it be wealth, entertainment, food, or even sexual stimulation, there is no surer path to fulfillment in our infantile era of 'let people enjoy things' than in taking a step back and admitting you've had your share for now. Come back another time and have more when the time is right; no one ever gazed at a fast food addict and thought, "He's the happiest man I know." >>2268 A childish and depressingly uninspired perspective all too popular with the terminally online. What is music if not mere noise? What is a rotisserie chicken if not a decaying bird corpse? But it is our humanity that allows us to see beyond the literal; to turn such noise and a pile of bird flesh into a memorable dinner spent with family. I hope that you will one day discover personal meaning in your life's choices and experiences.

>>2267 Well lance, I've been threatening to throw out the printer for years, and I finally did. Brother is joining everyone else with a new printer-as-a-service subscription in Europe, which will soon arrive here. Picked up a WWII vintage Royal for pocket change at an estate sale; so long, printer corpos.

>>2271 Thanks, hope you did yourself gunship. Appreciate the recommendation. >Colonel Hackworth's About Face TBH, never heard of it before your post here.

>>2273 I won't attempt to write a review of About Face here; there are plenty of those already. But let me tell you briefly about the man who wrote it. Ever see Apocalypse Now? Hack was the inspiration for Colonel Kilgore, the man who loved the smell of napalm in the morning. Hack was a very unconventional leader, who interestingly grew up just a stone's throw from me. General Creighton Abrams called him "the best battalion commander I ever saw in the United States Army." He had an almost inhuman knack for seeing through bullshit, resulting in an ABC interview that the Army worked overtime to blackhole, and a scathing attack on Naval Admiral Boorda that led the admiral to commit suicide. At fourteen, Hack paid an alcoholic to pose as his father so he could join the military in search of adventure. But as he rose through the intermediate officer ranks, Hack came to hate everything about the Army except the soldiers themselves. And he stopped giving a shit about everything else. The man brought a surfboard to Vietnam, ran a whorehouse for his men and used the proceeds to improve his soldiers' quality of life, stole vehicles from other units and had them repainted, and turned a miserable battalion of draftees into one of the most efficient units of the war. He broke almost every rule in the book to do it, but was untouchable because of how effective his methods were. I recommend his books so highly because the lessons learned and lessons taught are numerous, a symposium on unconventional leadership and responsibility.

You guys remember the modern server I set up to mine Monero? Yeah, I gave up on trying to make money with that thing. After months and months of absolutely nothing happening other than me doing updates and reconnecting the possibly failing wifi card, I realized that managing it has ultimately been nothing more than a dull, pointless chore. I'm not getting rid of the server though, I'm going to finally go through with an idea I've been playing around with for years, and make it into an AI server. Of course, I'm going to have to refamiliarize myself with the world of chatbots and all the relevant software I've been ignoring since I stepped back from the IT game, but I have the feeling I would've ended up doing that anyways. It's a relatively capable machine: certainly no older than seven years, featuring six cores (twelve with hyperthreading) with 48GB of ECC-DDR3 RAM. Not exactly top-of-the-line, and the 4TB of mechanical hard drive space (closer to 2TB with a RAID 6 configuration) leaves much to be desired, but it's a functioning starting point, and there's four additional RAID cage slots if I really feel like sinking some money into more storage. I also slapped an anemic old GTX-960 I had lying around purely to squeeze as much power as I can out of the machine. Naturally, I'm not expecting any miracles out of this setup, but at least I'll be able to feel like I'm accomplishing something by attempting to cram an AI waifu into this thing. I also got rid of the finicky old WiFi card in favor of a firewall server (which has more stable built-in wifi) which is adorably tiny. It's probably the smallest proper computer I've ever owned, including laptops, and it's not too bad specwise either (8GB DDR4, 8th gen i5, and 250GB of NVME storage minus the NVME storage, the whole system cost me a grand total of ten dollars, thank God for recycling centers). I have some long-game plans for that little computer, but that's neither here nor now. Both servers will have Debian Unstable because I want my computers to reflect my mental state I want up-to-date software and libraries (something that Mint, unfortunately, isn't very good for), so hopefully I won't have to fuck around trying to solve dependency problems too much. If I'm lucky, nothing will break the system or be completely unuseable. To be quite honest, I should have started this project in earnest years ago. It's time consuming, mentally stimulating, and has the potential to become something, dare I say, I could lastingly enjoy. It might not work, and I might fail in my endeavours once more, but I'm going to try.

>>2275 >AI server I thought about this myself a couple of years ago as well. Unfortunately almost everything AI-related today runs on GPUs instead of CPUs - mostly the 8GB+ models, 3080s and whatnot. And even more depressingly, the recent trend in AI has moved entirely away from text/chat generation to image generation, so there's been little excitement after EleutherAI's last GPT model. On the topic of image generation though, it's quite amazing what Stable Diffusion recently launched. NovelAI (that AI text service I migrated to after the AI Dungeon fiasco) has their own anime model, and it's an amazingly good waifu generator. Their image generator uses Danbooru tags, and is basically an imageboard that feeds you handcrafted images of your preferred tags. You can even upload a character and let the AI generate new images based on it. Pretty neat stuff. I hope the AI server works out, but you'll most likely end up having to buy a GPU for it. I had considered just renting a GPU and connecting my server to it, or even just using a service like Hugging Face. Ultimately though, the pace of AI development in established opensource teams was moving along faster than I could keep up with, and I opted to just use other people's crap instead of DIY-ing it.

>>2274 Thanks! Sounds pretty inspiring tbh.

>>2275 >It might not work, and I might fail in my endeavours once more, but I'm going to try. Godspeed Anon! If our plans for effective waifus running on low-end commodity h/w ever comes to fruition, then you should be golden. :^) >btw wonderful song, is that waifu's bar anywhere nearby? Keep.moving.forward. >>2276 >Ultimately though, the pace of AI development in established opensource teams was moving along faster than I could keep up with It's worse than any of us can imagine or so I imagine. Large-scale data is a fundamentally-flawed approach to the waifu problem--at least insofar as my dream of a two waifus in everyman's pot.

Merry Christmas, /f/ ! Miss hearing from you Anons.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you've all had a good time over the holiday, and a pleasant new years going forward. >>2280 I haven't had much to post about lately. Work has been a slog, and I've only just recently moved to a more agreeable schedule. I do have a couple personal projects in the works, but it'll be some time before I get anywhere notable with them. How about you, anon? Anything good happen with you?

>>2281 Hi Flash! >Anything good happen with you? The Lord's blessed me with health, a roof over my head, and food in my belly. I'm content. Also, my programming skills are consistently improving AFAICT, and my imagination and vision don't seem to be waning. My lack of further concern over our civilization has really freed up a lot for me. What a time to be alive, actually! :^)

Just dropping in for a moment. The Wikipedia redesign is cancer and you can't even log in without javascript to expand the 'three dot' icon. Fuck the modern web and fuck javascript. I'm in a web dev class right now hoping for an easy A and I wish I could die. Frameworks are a disgrace.

>>2272 Beautiful typewriter. Been looking for a selectric myself. >>2270 I concur.

"Wikipedia Gets a Fresh New Look: First Desktop Update in a Decade Puts Usability at the Forefront" (by hiding everything the user might want to do behind menus) https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/01/18/wikipedia-gets-a-fresh-new-look-first-desktop-update-in-a-decade-puts-usability-at-the-forefront/

>>2286 >>2288 First saw it earlier and initially thought I accidentally followed a mobile link. "Desktop update" my ass, look at all the unused space! What the fuck is with site redesigns and using less and less screen real estate? It's not like anything else is going to use what's left over, the page doesn't have to make room for tons of frames like it's the fucking 90s or something. Debian did this too somewhat recently and it's dumb as shit.

>>2289 >and it's dumb as shit. That's it exactly Anon. The Globohomo knows that the illiterate brown masses they dream of for the world's future can't actually handle information, so don't confuse them. It's all just groundwork. Dumb it down, goy! >tl;dr Niggers. Women. Need more be said?

>>2290 /pol/ is full of browns try harder

>>2293 >>2293 >>2293

>>2291 JIDF, pls. >>2292 Cyoot kitteh! The little White patch under the neck lends a distinctive air.

Just as the Python 2/3 split seems to finally be drawing to a close, I've started to encounter the Java 1.8/Java <rapid release version number goes here> clusterfuck more frequently. The other day I had to repeatedly hop back and forth between java versions in order to compile an android application (Signal) due to differing version requirements for maven and various parts of the source code. We will never learn.

>>2297 As much as it's a bit of a hindrance from moving forward into modern paradigms, Bjarne Stroustrup's absolute autistic insistence that C++ remain backwards compatible with C has mostly made this entire thing a non-issue with Sepples. I naively though Python would be a piece of cake to use for AI research. Then I ran straight into the dependency hell so absolutely prevalant in that entire domain and finally gave up. AFAICT, it's much more complicated that simply what major version of Python you happen to be using.

When I had to set up deepcreampy I encountered that, too. Also, a lot of laserdiscs are so goddamn cheap; I've started collecting them since I got a player recently. It's been fun so far.

Having a lot of fun. Could probably do with getting into higher levels of autism regarding laser disc preservation. Like doing the "domesday duplicator" method of preservation at the pit level by modding a player. I looked into it and it seems like the method is simple enough. Might muck around with cheaper possible alternatives to the expensive FPGA device, though; apparently there's a linux driver for an old conexant video capture chip that can turn it into a general purpose ADC for recording anything. The comb filter on this player is a little annoying, since it elects to split and then re-combine the signal inside the player. Which feels quite dumb. On the other hand, looking at the service manual, there might be a way for me to make a bit-perfect composite capture by hooking a network analyzer up to the DAC inside the player (which converts the pit reads back to a composite video signal, basically, from what I can see in the schematics). So yeah, I've got a new toy to play with. Been getting some nice captures so far. More discs are on the way from Japan.

Probably it for now. Just gonna recommend Bubblegum Crisis one more time.

>>2302 Sounds interesting. Good luck, Lance!

Well, I've finally taken the first real steps into making my server an AI server. I took the plunge and bought a brand-new graphics card for more power and installed KoboldAI to get started. I also installed one of those image generator apps onto my phone, and plan on having a proper model set up on my server. I've got to say, I'm surprised at how cheap GPUs have gotten. I remember buying a GTX 1080 nearly a decade ago when they were the hottest thing around, and it cost me like ~$650. The GPU I just got kicks its ass and cost a little over half as much. In this experience, I've also learned something about myself. Namely that I have a serious fetish for AIs. Like, I was keen on the idea of an AI waifu before, but I never realized just how much of an effect it has on me. It's almost instant horniness, to the point where I'll almost certainly have to make a real effort to control myself in the future, because I'm apparently hardwired to want to agressively pin down and breed a computer and I never fully realized it until now and since I'm also hardwired for self-reflection, I was thinking about this as the AI made my horny. Yes, that feels as weird as it sounds. Even the fact that I'm working with limited locally-computed models (i.e. digital retards living on my server rent-free) isn't stopping this. I'm going to do some serious self-reflecting to figure out where this drive comes from. While it could simply be the result of my many years spent working with computers, my instincts are telling me that the root cause lies somewhere deeper. Deeper isn't a place where I like to go, since it's where my repressed memories go and it reminds me of why I gave up on so many things, but I'll have to do it if I want this to work properly. On the brighter side, when I finally do get an actual robot waifu, I now know that I'm already fully mentally equipped to shove my way through whatever challenges that comes with. In the end, I suppose that's a net benefit. If nothing else, I can count it among the list of obscure perks that come with being completely fucking insane.

Addendum: I also have a new item for my growing list of things that are bullshit about Debian. So, to date I've been using the testing version of Debian on my servers (the AI server and gateway server), and I've only just recently learned that the testing installer is for testing the installer, not for installing the testing version of Debian. They do not make this apparent on their DL page, and I only came to learn this from an old forum post. I'd say that this ranks a bit above 'somehow making DHCP work on what is supposed to be a static network' in terms of shit that I didn't want or ask for. I didn't figure this out until I did a reinstallation on my AI server to accomodate a more exotic setup I had in mind. Which brings me to a PSA: Don't bother with NVME unless the computer you're working with has built-in support for it. Seriously, you're asking for a world of pain if you try to make NVME work through a PCI-E adapter on an older machine. The only reason I did it is because I already had the adapter and didn't feel like returning it. The speed difference is very noticeable, but I can't help but feel that I'd have been better off just shoving in some SSDs on the SATA bus.

>>2305 >because I'm apparently hardwired to want to agressively pin down and breed a computer and I never fully realized it until now Top kek. >my instincts are telling me that the root cause lies somewhere deeper. Got you fam. Two words: >/robo >waifu/ :^) >when I finally do get an actual robot waifu, I now know that I'm already fully mentally equipped to shove my way through whatever challenges that comes with. Noice. She's already waiting for you out there r/n, so hurry it up Flash! >