Buddahriffic

@Buddahriffic@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Some arcades were actually a bit more manipulative than that in that they’d get harder depending on how long it was since you last put a quarter in.

  Mortal Kombat was one. I noticed this pattern on the snes version of MK3 (can’t remember if it was ultimate or not that I had): I’d easily win one fight, then get demolished by the next fighter. Then continue and that same fighter would be easy, only for the next one after that to be much more difficult. I didn’t have to put quarters into my snes but they just used the same tuning from the arcade machines.

  Eventually when I played that game, I was spending much more time on the space invaders minigame lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch for users⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also if the CEO of target decides he really doesn’t like a popular shirt and is able to force everyone to only shop at target, then he can come a lot closer to snuffing out the existence of that shirt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s because they are horrible at problem solving and creativity. They are based on word association from training purely on text. The technical singularity will need to innovate on its own so that it can improve the hardware it runs on and its software.

  Even though github copilot has impressed me by implementing a 3 file Python script from scratch to finish such that I barely wrote any code, I had to hold its hand the entire way and give it very specific instructions about every function as we added the pieces one by one to build it up. And even then, it would get parts I failed to specify completely wrong and initially implemented things in a very inefficient way.

  There are fundamental things that the technical singularity needs that today’s LLMs lack entirely. I think the changes that would be required to get there will also change them from LLMs into something else. The training is a part of it, but fundamentally, LLMs are massive word association engines. Words (or vectors translated to and from words) are their entire world and they can only describe things with those words because it was trained on other people doing that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t hate AI or LLMs. As much as it might mess up civilization as we know it, I’d like to see the technological singularity during my lifetime, though I think the fixation on LLMs will do more to delay than realize that.

  I just think that there’s a lot of people fooled by their conversational capability into thinking they are more than what they are and using the fact that these models are massive with billions or trillions of weighs that the data is encoded into and no one understands how they work to the point of being able to definitively say “this is why it suggested glue as a pizza topping” to put whether or not it approaches AGI in a grey zone.

  I’ll agree though that it was maybe too much to say they don’t have knowledge. “Having knowledge” is a pretty abstract and hard to define thing itself, though I’m also not sure it directly translates to having intelligence (which is also poorly defined tbf). Like one could argue that encyclopedias have knowledge, but they don’t have intelligence. And I’d argue that LLMs are more akin to encyclopedias than how we operate (though maybe more like a chatbot dictionairy that pretends to be an encyclopedia).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Calling the errors “hallucinations” is kinda misleading because it implies there’s regular real knowledge but false stuff gets mixed in. That’s not how LLMs work.

  LLMs are purely about word associations to other words. It’s just massive enough that it can add a lot of context to those associations and seem conversational about almost any topic, but it has no depth to any of it. Where it seems like it does is just because the contexts of its training got very specific, which is bound to happen when it’s trained on every online conversation its owners (or rather people hired by people hired by its owners) could get their hands on.

  All it does is, given the set of tokens provided and already predicted, plus a bit of randomness, what is the most likely token to come next, then repeat until it predicts an “end” token.

  Earlier on when using LLMs, I’d ask it about how it did things or why it would fail at certain things. ChatGPT would answer, but only because it was trained on text that explained what it could and couldn’t do. Its capabilities don’t actually include any self-reflection or self-understanding, or any understanding at all. The text it was trained on doesn’t even have to reflect how it really works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leaked images of soon to be released Cyber Plane⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Those aren’t pens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure where 1440p would land, but after using one for a while, I was going to upgrade my monitor to 4k but realized I’m not disappointed with my current resolution at all and instead opted for a 1440p ultrawide and haven’t regretted it at all.

  My TV is 4k, but I have no intention of even seriously looking at anything 8k.

  Screen specs seem like a mostly solved problem. Would be great if focus could shift to efficiency improvements instead of adding more unnecessary power. Actually, boot time could be way better, too (ie get rid of the smart shit running on a weak processor, emphasis on the first part).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No brainer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or maybe you get gravel in the same sense that someone could own Jupiter or a star. “You now own all the gravel in that quary!” But it doesn’t inform the workers of that fact, or the officials who still rely on whatever paperwork was filled out by the agents of the guy who paid them to ensure the quary belongs to his corporation’s corporation. The whole idea of ownership is pretty abstract in the first place.

  Could be that every pill just means that, under the jurisdiction of the entity who made the pills, you are legally allowed to do what the pills claim, though you need to figure out the rest from there, and people from other jurisdictions are able to disagree even if you do figure out the how.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No brainer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless he was as skilled in robotics and engineering as a fish was at climbing trees.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨holup⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Get a “replace the pin in the grenade before the time runs out” alarm clock. Then, if you sleep in anyways, it won’t be your problem anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨holup⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought you were going to say it was a BBQ sauce spiced with Carolina Reapers. In which case, avoid using heavy amounts in groin area and sleep with goggles on. Maybe even tie your hands up so you don’t scratch anywhere in your sleep.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good for plants⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve wondered if it was because the air vibrations that sound is help knock dust loose from the plant, which helps gasses get in and out as well as more light.

  Heavy metal probably has the most vibration going on out of all genres.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rule 34 rule⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey you should have some pride in your dad, being able to keep going longer than a movie!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Guessing you mean in a similar vein to the connection between various degrees and food service jobs?

  Personally, I’ve been able to avoid IT jobs so far.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Computer science is not IT. IT is about knowing how to use, deploy, and administer existing software solutions, along with a bit of light development to get things to work together when they aren’t necessarily directly compatible.

  CS is about creating software solutions and understanding how the pieces fit together (at a low level), as well as how to evaluate algorithms and approach problem solving.

  It’s not even coding, though coding is obviously involved. For a coding class, they’ll teach you the language and give problems to help learn that language. For CS classes, they might not care what language you use, or they might tell you to use specific ones and expect you to learn it on your own time. The languages are just tools through which you learn the CS concepts.

  An IT professional might know about kernel features and how they relate to overall performance. A coder might be aware that there is a kernel doing OS stuff under the hood. A computer scientist might know the specifics of various parts of what a kernel does and how one is implemented, perhaps they’ve even implemented one themselves for a class (I have, though I was personally interested in that kind of thing and it was for a class notorious for being difficult, so most grads didn’t).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Blizzard used a cheat detection system in wow that allowed their server to send arbitrary code for clients to run. The code failing to return an expected result was a sign that there was tampering going on. Emulating windows api to run on Linux is a form of tampering, though obviously not necessarily a sign of cheating. Guessing they used some code that didn’t work on Linux and banned everyone who failed before realizing that some failed due to Linux, and then were able to separate the Linux users from detected cheaters by how it failed (either that or they had to undo all bans from that round).

  Though it does make me wonder if it meant they can’t/don’t detect cheaters on Linux. Probably not, because my guess is they start out by looking for any cheats they can find, install them on test machines, then work at detecting the differences between those test machines and ones without the cheat. So they’d know about Linux-based cheats, too. They might even be able to use timing-based attacks to detect kernel level ones, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you realize your laptop hasn't been plugged in for the last 4 hours you've been working...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hammond also gets a very different ending in the book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you realize your laptop hasn't been plugged in for the last 4 hours you've been working...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Their system was set up such that when they rebooted the whole thing (which they needed to do to get out of the lockout Nerdy used, intending to steal the DNA samples, deliver them to his contact at the docks, then return without anyone realizing what had happened), it would first start up only using AUX power. Then they just needed to run a command to have the system switch to main power.

  But they forgot because the whole island was a well-polished shit that they were barely holding together and hadn’t ever trained on what to do after a reset.

  After this scene, the power goes out through the whole park and to restore it, someone needs to go to the power station and manually activate the mechanism that closes the breaker to bring main power back on.

  In the movie, IIRC they just skipped straight to the “start the power up manually in the power station”, which Ellie does after Arnold fails to do so or return.

  The book had a better system overall (where main power could have been turned on from the control room, or safely in the bunker if they had remembered it before the fences failed) and the issue was with a lack of experience with that system. The movie’s version was simpler but a stupid system for a park full of dangerous predators because it didn’t have a fail safe at all. Plus that stupid 3d interface that apparently Lex knew and was thus able to figure how to enable secondary systems when all of that would be custom software running on the OS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teddybears - Punkrocker⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or they could do something like the One Punch Man game, where you can select Saitama and he will destroy anyone else without effort (unless it’s a mirror match, in which case it’s a normal fight). But, because it’s Saitama, he’s always running late.

  So you pick teams of 3 and if Saitama is on yout team, you have to survive with just 2 until he gets there.

  So a game where you play as someone else but superman can show up and stomp everything before going off to do something else could work. You’ve gotta survive until he gets there and maybe do things to get his attention or help resolve some other issue he’s dealing with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Now I finally get it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, the only conclusion you can logically draw is that it’s impossible to know if they do or don’t exist. Instead of seeing the world as a set of ideas that either resolve to true or false, I see it as a set of ideas that resolve to true, false, or unknown.

  Which also “resolves” a bunch of language paradoxes that depend on the only options being “true” or “false”. Like “this statement is false”. It also works on the halting problem, though still doesn’t make it trivial to solve (it just defeats the paradox proof if you allow a third option for paradoxes instead of insisting it only returns true or false).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Now I finally get it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I did change my mind from atheism to agnosticism just because a lack of evidence isn’t a proof and you can’t prove a negative. Established religions reek of control and manipulation, but I had to also conclude that it was naive to have faith that there isn’t anything more to whatever this reality is beyond what we can tell with science.

  At the very least, there’s future scientific discoveries we can only guess at, but there’s also unknowable things, at least given the limitations we currently have as beings of this reality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would one exit a black hole?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hell, forget the photon sphere, even. Know that jet of energy black holes are thought to sprew out at their poles due to the material falling in to them? Imagine what that material is doing inside the event horizon. Whatever it is, it’ll be pretty violent, enough to call the moon slamming into the earth “relatively peaceful”. It would probably be more pleasant hanging out in the core of the sun than even an AU away from a black hole’s event horizon (and I mean on the outside).

  Also, the event horizon is where light cannot escape. The “spacecraft event horizon”, or the orbital plane surrounding a black hole where a spacecraft couldn’t escape it is going to be much farther out, unless we can figure out ftl travel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Can’t they just offer access to your data back at a discounted rate compared to what they charge their data partners for it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Now I finally get it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Problem is Genesis was written before the religion it was written for decided it was a monotheist religion that believed it was the only truth. So Yaweh created Adam and Eve, who had a couple of sons, one killed the other, but then that other went out and joined up with the other people made from other gods or titans or whatever, somehow convinced some of them to join his clan for a god that loved them, but then hated them because they sought knowledge (via eating fruit lol they really didn’t want their followers to be able to figure out shit to the point of even misdirecting them for how one obtains knowledge).

  Where it falls apart even considering the original context is Noah’s flood, because that did apparently wipe everyone out except one mating pair per species, so how did Noah’s descendents repopulate the world without other populations to hook up with?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Worst part about living in Europe⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, with those bottles, if you’re prepared for them to potentially explode, you can open them carefully and just close it again if pressure leaks out quickly once the seal opens. Then let out the extra pressure in short bursts and the bubbles won’t bring a bunch of liquid with them because they can’t build enough momentum to lift it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LibreOffice is right about Microsoft, and it matters more than you think.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure which of the subgroups of this is more frustrating: the ones who refuse to put the necesarry thought towards understanding it but would be able to do so if they did, or the ones who do try their best but still can’t figure out such simple instructions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I invented a shirt that caused cameras to be damaged when filmed/photographed, would I be committing a crime by wearing the shirt at events with cameras?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That was an episode that ended right where it started getting good. Not that the episode was bad before that, but it left me wanting more of that, not a jump to a new premise in the next episode.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I invented a shirt that caused cameras to be damaged when filmed/photographed, would I be committing a crime by wearing the shirt at events with cameras?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Parabolic would only work if the camera is in the focal point, so you’d need a different part of the parabola or a different parabola depending on where you are standing relative to the camera. This is in addition to the aiming mechanism.

  And even then, I’m not convinced it will damage all camera techs instead of just overexposing the image or frame for some. If they just clamp the affected pixels instead of trying to maintain the relative brightness, they might be able to still see your face clearly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Ice alert app founder sparking fury in Trump officials: ‘Pam Bondi said I better watch out? Please.’⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sad part is when I first read that title, I thought it was part of the war on climate change data rather than tracking the new gestapo. Both are equally plausible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At this point, I don’t think there’s enough competent therapists in the world to help everyone who could use some therapy. And that’s ignoring the bad therapists who can make things worse and the whole bit where therapists like to get paid but not everyone who needs them can pay them.