drosophila
@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Star Citizen is on course to reach $1 billion in player funding in 2026, and we still might not get to play its singleplayer campaign next year 3 days ago:
it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that
If you can skip that process by paying real money, and the things you unlock are gameplay affecting upgrades, then that’s pay-to-win. That’s what the phrase originally meant before being diluted by morons. Non pay-to-win microtransactions are purely cosmetic.
Not that people should be playing any game that’s infested with a microtransaction funding model. Let alone one with a base price of $45, let alone one with absolutely absurd “micro”-transactions meant to prey on mentally ill people, let alone one that’s already taken people’s free money only to implement all of the above.
At one point in time horse armor was enough cause controversy. How did it all go so wrong?
- Comment on I promise, no one can tell that you're high at work, trust me 1 week ago:
Out of curiosity what do you think your thought process would be in a McDonald’s?
- Comment on earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard 2 weeks ago:
Sort of
Today we differentiate between the physical substance (or category of substances that are the ethers) and the alchemical concept of the aether, but look at the etymology of “ether”.
The term “ethyl”, as in ethyl alcohol or ethanol, similarly traces its origins back to “ether”.
At the time these various “light” flammable easily evaporated substances were conflated with each other, and were thought to be this sorta mystical stuff that was the fifth element from which the 4 other ones were differentiated from. Since it was undifferentiated it was supposed to be “pure”, and free of the messiness of ordinary life (space was thought to be filled with it because of the “perfect” predictable movements of the heavenly bodies). This is also where we get the word “quintessential”, which literally means “fifth essence”, to mean a pure, perfect, and archetypical example of something, without complications. It’s also where we get the word “ethereal” to mean “otherworldly”, “light”, “ghostly”, etc.
It’s for similar reasons that we use the word “spirit” to mean both something that comes in a bottle and a disembodied soul. All sorts of alchemists from different areas and different times believed different things of course, but a lot of alchemical thought was based on the idea that everything had essences inside it which were hard to perceive or touch directly but which gave things their properties. In other words something’s essence is it’s spirit.
Of course what they called “spirits” or “essences” were really things like distillation products, gasses driven off by heating, and the colored flames that you get when you put some metals in fire. But that’s what they thought was going on.
- Comment on Asking the right questions... 3 weeks ago:
A better test would be to see how it compares to previous posts on his social media accounts from, say, around 2020.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 3 weeks ago:
The thing about this perspective is that I think its actually overly positive about LLMs, as it frames them as just the latest in a long line of automations.
Not all automations are created equal. For example, compare using a typewriter to using a text editor. Besides a few details about the ink ribbon and movement mechanisms you really haven’t lost much in the transition. This is despite the fact that the text editor can be highly automated with scripts and hot keys, allowing you to manipulate even thousands of pages of text at once in certain ways. Using a text editor certainly won’t make you forget how to write like using ChatGPT will.
I think the difference lies in the relationship between the person and the machine. To paraphrase Cathode Ray Dude, people who are good at using computers deduce the internal state of the machine, mirror (a subset) of that state as a mental model, and use that to plan out their actions to get the desired result. People that aren’t good at using computers generally don’t do this, and might not even know how you would start trying to.
For years ‘user friendly’ software design has catered to that second group, as they are both the largest contingent of users and the ones that needed the most help. To do this software vendors have generally done two things: try to move the necessary mental processes from the user’s brain into the computer and hide the computer’s internal state (so that its not implied that the user has to understand it, so that a user that doesn’t know what they’re doing won’t do something they’ll regret, etc). Unfortunately this drives that first group of people up the wall. Not only does hiding the internal state of computer make it harder to deduce it, every “smart” feature they add to try to move this mental process into the computer itself only makes the internal state more complex and harder to model.
Many people assume that if this is the way you think about software you are just an elistist gatekeeper, and you only want your group to be able to use the computer. Or you might even be accused of ableism. But the real reason is what I described above, even if its not usually articulated in that way.
Now, I am of the opinion that the ‘mirroring the internal state’ method of thinking is the superior way to interact with the machine, and the approach to user friendliness I described has actually done a lot of harm to our relationship with computers at a societal level. (This is an opinion I suspect many people here would agree with.) And yet that does not mean that I think computers should be difficult to use. Quite the opposite, I think that modern computers are too complicated, and that in an ideal world their internal states and abstractions would be much simpler and more elegant, but no less powerful. (But elaborating on that would make this comment even longer.) Nor do I think that computers shouldn’t be accessible to people with different levels of ability. But just as a random person in a store shouldn’t grab a wheelchair user’s chair handles and start pushing them around, neither should Windows (for example) start changing your settings on updates without asking.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I think LLMs are basically the ultimate in that approach to ‘user friendliness’. They try to move more of your thought process into the machine than ever before, their internal state is more complex than ever before, and it is also more opaque than ever before. They also reflect certain values endemic to the corporate system that produced them: that the appearance of activity is more important than the correctness or efficacy of that activity. But that is, again, a whole other comment.
- Comment on Amazon’s AI ‘Banana Fish’ Dubs Are Hilariously, Inexcusably Bad 4 weeks ago:
Voice acting is so incredibly disrespected, its not a surprise at all they’d try to replace it with this garbage.
- Comment on What did I forget? 4 weeks ago:
I like Kazakhstan’s flag because I think its a nice combination of colors:
Its not very low entropy though, at least not compared to ones like Germany’s or Ukraine’s.
- Comment on The Xbox 360 came out 20 years ago 4 weeks ago:
So for you I guess the proper comparison would be that the Xbox 360 is now as old as the IBM System/360 mainframe was when the NES released in NA. Image
- Comment on The Xbox 360 came out 20 years ago 4 weeks ago:
The NES having released in North America in 1985, this means that the 360 is now roughly as old as the NES was when the 360 came out.
- Comment on It is a silly place. 4 weeks ago:
It appears that this quote is from this clickhole article.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 5 weeks ago:
Hallucinations are an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. OpenAI, literally the people with the most to lose if AI isn’t useful, has admitted that hallucinations are a mathematical inevitability, not something that can be engineered around. On top of that, been found that for things like mathematical proof finding switching to more sophisticated models doesn’t make them more accurate, it just makes their arguments more convincing.
Now, you might say “oh but you can have a human in the loop to check the AIs work”, but for programming tasks its already been found that using LLMs makes programmers less productive. If a human needs to go over everything an AI generates, and reason about it anyway, that’s not really saving time or effort. Now consider that as you make the LLM more complex, having it generate longer and more complicated blocks of text, its errors also become harder to detect. Is that not just shuffling around the necessary human brainpower for a task instead of reducing it?
So, in what field is this sort of thing useful? At one point I was hopeful that LLMs could be used in text summarization, but if I have to read the original text anyway to make sure that I haven’t been fed some highly convincing falsehood then what is the point?
Currently I’m of the opinion that we might be able to use specialized LLMs as a heuristic to narrow the search tree for things like SAT solvers and answer set generators, but I don’t have much optimism for other use cases.
- Comment on Google’s Sundar Pichai says the job of CEO is one of the ‘easier things’ AI could soon replace 1 month ago:
Would it be possible that CEOs have people employed to take some of their tasks? Some CEOs, all their tasks?
Is a CEOs job the same when theres 50 people under him/her or 5000? Which do you think could run itself the best?
If other people are doing your work for you then it sounds like you’re not working full time.
- Comment on Peter Thiel dumps entire Nvidia stake, slashes Tesla holdings amid bubble fears 1 month ago:
Its not just SEO, they intentionally made search worse.
- Comment on Peter Thiel dumps entire Nvidia stake, slashes Tesla holdings amid bubble fears 1 month ago:
Isn’t this an interesting property of market economies?
Software and silicon chip manufacturing has literally nothing to do with food production and yet a ‘disaster’ (I.E. going back to the status quo as of a few years ago) in that industry will affect your ability to eat. Nothing has happened to the farmers or their fields, or to the logistics system that moves food from one place to another, and yet somehow things suddenly can’t find their way from where they are produced to where they are needed.
Remember, this is supposed to be the most efficient way to allocate resources.
- Comment on Stop stressing my GPU and start hiring artists 1 month ago:
The Neverhood literally consists of photographs, it is as photorealistic as it is possible to be, and yet it has a very strong art direction. More modern titles like The Midnight Walk, Keeper, and Felt That Boxing are similar, though they are actually rendered rather than consisting of photographs and video. On the other side of the coin there are some visual effects that are quite stylized but also very GPU intensive, showing that just because an image doesn’t look like a photo doesn’t mean that its necessarily easy to render (note, that video is a human authored algorithm, not AI, though they do compare it to AI video generation and it does have a mode where you can make your own paint strokes for an example scene and it tries to set its parameters to mimic yours).
I used to have the same opinion that you express, but I think this was only ever really true in practice during the brown era, and not before or after. In fact some games like Thief 1&2, Half Life 1&2, and the Chronicles of Riddick were trying to be as photorealistic as possible at the time of their release, but are now pretty commonly praised for their “stylization” today. For example, the deep blacks and stark contrast of stencil shadows vs what you get with more modern lighting. I am reminded of a Brian Eno quote:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
We are even seeing some nostalgia now for the pissfilter era, though that’s not an enthusiasm that I share. I suspect that we will eventually see TAA ghosting and ray tracing artifacts, that are currently much hated, be recreated in a controlled way as a stylistic choice. In particular I think that Control will eventually be praised for the way that it basically incorporated ray tracing artifacts into its art style, by using shimmery walls and a dreamlike atmosphere.
- Comment on Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic 1 month ago:
IMO the combat mechanics shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but the developers were terrified of making a player-character that wasn’t a demigod that can slaughter an entire army.
I still think Dishonored 1 & 2 are both really good games, but its like they made Portal but just let you break the walls of the test chambers and walk right through if you felt like it.
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 1 month ago:
The Soviets tried something similar.
- Comment on 28-pound electric motor delivers 1000 horsepower 1 month ago:
Fixed
- Comment on fight club 1 month ago:
I don’t like the notion that if “being yourself” means people don’t like you, you must be acting like an asshole.
A lot of autistic people, for example, have to put on a mask just to function at all in society. Which is something that can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. When someone like that hears “just be yourself” it can be really frustrating, and the conflation of social skill with mortality I think causes a lot of harm.
- Comment on YSK before you buy a replacement for your cellphone that has stopped charging, buy the $10 cleaning kits and spend the time deep cleaning the phone's charging port. 1 month ago:
As an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure I recommend those tiny rubber stoppers you see in the photo. They have a peel and stick part that goes under your case which retains the plug on a strip of rubber. That strip might wear out in a few years and rip, but they cost almost nothing to replace (and in fact come in packs).
Phones used to have these things built in, then they stopped in the smartphone era because they didn’t look as sleek and futuristic I guess. Now, if you have a case, it once again makes hardly any difference to the appearance.
- Comment on 28-pound electric motor delivers 1000 horsepower 1 month ago:
Car engines, for probably the past 100 years, have always been advertised based on their peak power rating, not what they can produce continuously. Cars are not designed to have their accelerator peddles floored for hours on end, nor is this even possible to do, as you’d eventually hit a curve and need to slow down.
This is especially the case for high performance vehicles, which usually have more demanding maintenance requirements just from normal operation, let alone from being abused like that.
- Comment on What are your favorite games from a worldbuilding standpoint? 1 month ago:
The person that came up with that phrase is in charge of a game series with dialogue that makes your skull physically reform into a fedora.
- Comment on Nintendo's Creature Capture Patent Dealt Blow Amid Palworld Lawsuit 2 months ago:
Did you mean TotK instead of BotW?
I’ve played gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.
The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.
In addition to that, TotK takes gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.
And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 months ago:
I thought you were talking about just opening the drive to use it from the file browser.
I do actually have a drive I use for automated backups, but I just used the GUI to change the automount setting:
I guess that’s a little bit inconvenient, but its like 3 clicks, adding a step to something I had to do to set up some other software. Its not any more complicated than disabling sticky keys in Windows.
Except we’re not comparing it to disabling sticky keys, we’re comparing it to needing needing to follow an entire page’s worth of instructions, pressing secret key combinations and entering commands into the terminal, just so you can use your computer without it phoning home to the mothership. And that’s on top of the fact that the instructions are probably going to be different in a year since microsoft is doing this deliberately.
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 months ago:
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 months ago:
I just plugged in an old drive to make sure I’m not going crazy, and I didn’t do anything besides hit the power button, log in, and open the file explorer:
And its right there.
- Comment on plump pumkins 2 months ago:
Suppose the pumpkin plant could be bred or genetically engineered to retain its desirable taste even at very large sizes.
Would this even improve the caloric yield per acre? Or would the bottleneck be the available energy from photosynthesis? In other words do giant pumpkins take a proportionally larger amount of leaf surface area, such that you’re not actually getting any more pumpkin mass per acre than with many smaller pumpkins?
As I understand it normal pumpkins are already pretty high up there in terms of caloric yield, so perhaps there’s not much more room to push it.
- Comment on Secondsies 2 months ago:
I see this sort of thing all the time and it genuinely baffles me how people won’t cover up the entirety of the text they’re trying to censor. I’ve even seen people go over text with multiple passes of a transparent brush (which you can almost see through by squinting, let alone if you pulled it into a photo editor). Like, why?
- Comment on Smöl 2 months ago:
I think I understand your main point pretty well, that point being “takes bong rip bro, just think about how small an atom is bro, like bro, just think about how many atoms are in your hand bro, dude woah”.
Up until my last comment I was trying to have a meaningful conversation with you about things like organization in biological systems, but you’ve done nothing but talk past me while jerking yourself off over how much more “aware” you are than everyone else, even while you admit you don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about about cellular biology.
And by the way, I’m not attacking you for “explaining things in simple terms”, I’m attacking you because you said a bunch of stuff that’s factually wrong while acting like an ass.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 2 months ago:
8 billion now.
