hissingmeerkat

@hissingmeerkat@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Guild Wars (not GW2) didn’t have that problem. All of the skills are just available somewhere if you go get them. The only meaningful build choices are which skills you use, a small number of attributes, and how much of the stats from your gear you are willing to sacrifice to obtain other effects.

  You get to level 20 (the cap) fairly quickly in each campaign and still have all the rest of the game to play with expanding options instead of increasing numbers.

  You can’t just pick a single build and do everything with it, you need to adapt what you’re doing to the missions you encounter, so you’re more than encouraged to play with the other skills.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s because you’re the victim of a crime: extortion

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Salt, air and bricks: could this be the future of energy storage?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No. This is the alternate history of energy. We could have been building primarily molten salt solar plants for the last 40 years. They had similar costs to coal, fuel plants, could be built with no semiconductor manufacturing bottlenecks, provided more consistent base generation than wind, had no fuel dependencies, combustion emissions. Now photovoltaics and battery storage are cheaper, more efficient, don’t require water and cooling, and work with wind as well as solar, and aren’t really bottlenecked by manufacturing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does delisting a game make/save money?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re going to write it off on their taxes when though the titles aren’t even games that they own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the top 1% truly smart people the other 99% are dumb as a box of rocks. But exactly how fucking stupid is that 99% ?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m terms of abilities, there’s problems other people can solve that I never will even with years of study and training, and there are problems I can solve that my immediate peers never would, even with years of study and training.

  I’m terms off knowledge, everybody you meet knows something you don’t. (They might not have the ability to help you find what it is though)

  In terms of skills, behaviors it seems like nobody ever considers trying and finding out for themselves, which is endemic across all levels of academia, government, business, and profession, and in that matter they are all as dumb as a bunch of rocks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cool sorting algorithm from LinkLonk.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whether or not you use downvotes doesn’t really matter.

  If what you like is well represented by the Boba drinkers and the Boba drinkers disproportionally don’t like Cofee then Cofee will be disproportionally excluded from the top of your results. Unless you explore deeper the Cofee results will be pushed to the bottom of your results. And any that happen to come to the top will have arrived there from broad appeal and will have very little contribution to thinking you like Cofee.

  If you don’t let the math effectively push things away that are disliked by the people who like similar things as you then everything will saturate at maximum appeal and the whole system does nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cool sorting algorithm from LinkLonk.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s two problems. The first is that those other things you might like will be rated lower than things you appear to certainly like. That’s the “easy” problem and has solutions where a learning agent is forced to prefer exploring new options over sticking to preferences to some degree, but becomes difficult when you no longer know what is explored or unexplored due to some abstraction like dimension reduction or some practical limitation like a human can’t explore all of Lemmy like a robot in a maze.

  The second is that you might have preferences that other people who like the same things you’ve already indicated a taste for tend to dislike. For example there may be other people who like both Boba and Cofee but people who like one or the other tend to dislike the other. If you happen to encounter Boba first then Cofee will be predicted to be disliked based on the overall preferences of people who agree with your Boba preference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cool sorting algorithm from LinkLonk.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, not as simply as that. That’s the basic idea of recommendation systems that were common in the 1990s. The algorithm requires a tremendous amount of dimensionality reduction to work at scale. In that simple description it would need a trillion weights to compare the preferences of a million users to a million other users. If you reduce it to some standard 100-1000ish dimensions of preference it becomes feasible, but at the low end only contains about as much information as your own choices about subscribed to or blocked communities (obviously it has a much lower barrier of entry).

  There’s another important aspect of learning that the simple description leaves out, which is exploration. It will quickly start showing you things you reliably like, but won’t experiment with things it doesn’t know you’d like or not to find out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientist Discover How to Convert CO2 into Powder That Can Be Stored for Decades⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Carbon Catch and Release

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Air: Where did that bring you? Back to me.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Air cooling is just vacuum cooling with extra steps.