skulblaka
@skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on The Elder God 18 hours ago:
I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to ‘God’ are all answered at about the same 50% rate.
- George Carlin
- Comment on It's interesting that gun rights were sold on the basis of "resisting unlawful government." They seen to have caused unlawful government. 2 days ago:
Steve Bannon, as much of a piece of shit as he is, had a good plan and executed it well. He’s talked about it openly. This has been brewing for decades, at least.
- Comment on xkcd #3104: Tukey 4 days ago:
Oh I keep this one memorized.
[Mr. Madison,] What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I’ve successfully used this twice in DnD and once in real life.
- Comment on Good job 1 week ago:
I’ve been using Fences for like 10 years with roll-up containers. Now that I’ve switched to Linux actually having icons on my desktop again is kind of driving me nuts.
Do you know of an alternative?
- Comment on ICE thugs pounced on a man right there in the courthouse, mere minutes after his immigration case was dismissed 2 weeks ago:
They aren’t agents unless they have a badge and a warrant. Failing to produce those means you are being assaulted by unknown assailants. Your freedom and life are already in danger at that point and you have a legal right to self defense.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 2 weeks ago:
Fair enough, you got me there. Didn’t realize there was such a population of internet craving people in what’s supposed to be one of the last relatively untouched areas of nature on the planet.
That being the case though, why didn’t this all happen in 2013, when O3b launched to specifically solve this problem for them? It’s still running, by the way, after several rounds of upgrades, and significantly more stable than Starlink with their dinky little 5 year disposables. Microsoft, Honeywell and Amazon all use it. But the original and ongoing intent of the project was explicitly to bring internet access to all otherwise unreachable areas, such as islands, deep in Africa, and the open ocean.
I don’t oppose Brazilian villagers having internet if they want it, but the situation in which it arrived to them feels suspect to me. I have no proof that Starlink actively went out and pushed internet service onto them like a drug dealer but it would not be out of character for Musk and his subordinates to do so, and that just feels bad.
Regardless there is already an existing solution to this. If you want internet in the Amazon you can use satellite internet. It does not have to be Starlink. If you want good internet, maybe don’t live in the Amazon. People in general should probably be leaving that place alone. The article you linked even talks about one of the village leaders splitting his time between the village and the city. We can try and run a fiber line to Manaus and/or Porto Velho and that should be able to serve a reasonably large enough area around them, but even if that fails there are already other solutions.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 2 weeks ago:
People paying for internet service don’t live in the Amazon rainforest
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 2 weeks ago:
But they specifically don’t want to do that because ensuring a 5 year service life means you are required to continue buying more satellites from them every 5 years. Literally burning resources into nothingness just to pursue a predatory subscription model.
It also helps their case that LEO has much lower latency than mid or high orbit but I refuse to believe that that is their primary driving concern behind this and not the former.
- Comment on How to hold onto a subway pole 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Amazing. 3 weeks ago:
Lost my job around 2017 and it was real difficult to get a new one in the tech sector without a college degree. I lucked in to the one originally through professional connections. No such luck the next time after I got downsized.
So I ended up working at my local auto parts store to make ends meet in the meantime, and figured out that I actually really like fixing cars. It exercises the same sort of problem solving capacity but the problems you solve are usually a little less arcane. Made a few new connections including a guy who worked at an actual garage, got offered a position at that garage if I wanted it, and the rest is history.
I still dabble in programming as a hobby, but I enjoy working with my hands and the feeling of fixing a physical object is more fulfilling to me than fixing software. So here I stay (for now).
- Comment on Amazing. 3 weeks ago:
I used to be a programmer and now I fix cars professionally, I feel like half of my professional life has been gazing upon some ancient work of dark magic and cussing loudly because I know I’m about to have to go in.
The line between jank and wizardry is sometimes blurry. The best magic has a little bit of jank in it, and the worst jank is sometimes a little bit magical.
- Comment on Four New N64 Recompiled and Ported Games Coming "Soon"! 3 weeks ago:
You would have fought him in Brannoch Castle shortly before finding Beigis and Bartholomew and going to Mammon’s World.
- Comment on Four New N64 Recompiled and Ported Games Coming "Soon"! 3 weeks ago:
Guilty got moved from being a story boss to being a secret superboss more befitting his actual lore, that’s all. Referenced removed from Brannoch because he isn’t there anymore.
- Comment on Four New N64 Recompiled and Ported Games Coming "Soon"! 3 weeks ago:
Quest 64 Hard Mode makes an attempt at fixing this. I’m not real far into it yet (Dondoran) but I’m enjoying what I’m seeing so far. I’m not sure how hard the “hard mode” is going to be late game though… Regular mode was already pretty oppressive without Magic Barrier.
- Comment on Former Meta exec says asking for artist permission will kill AI industry 3 weeks ago:
I don’t really disagree with your other two points, but
You can plagiarize with a computer with copy & paste too. That doesn’t change the fact that computers have legitimate non-infringing use cases.
They sure do, of which that is not one. That’s de facto copyright infringement or plagiarism. Especially if you then turn around and sell that product.
- Comment on *play imagine being sung by random white celeb* 3 weeks ago:
Therein lies your problem. I can show up for a weekend. I can show up for several weekends, in fact. I can’t sit in a protest for two weeks, because I have a job I need to keep in order to eat food and own a home.
As the economy collapses further more and more people will become available for the sort of protest required of them, because they will no longer have job responsibilities. Or food. Possibly including me.
Until that time, I will be making efforts to keep my job.
- Comment on On trees... 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Anthropic's Claude 4 could "blackmail" you in extreme situations 4 weeks ago:
Personally, I think the fundamental way that we’ve built these things kind of prevents any risk of actual sentient life from emerging. It’ll get pretty good at faking it - and arguably already kind of is, if you give it a good training set for that - but we’ve designed it with no real capacity for self understanding. I think a shift of the underlying mechanisms away from pattern chain matching and into a more… I guess “introspective” approach, is maybe the word I’m looking for? Right now our AIs have no capacity for reasoning, that’s not what they’re built for. Capacity for reasoning is going to need to be designed for, it isn’t going to just crop up if you let Claude cook on it for long enough. An AI needs to be able to reason about a problem and create a novel solution to it (even if incorrect) before we need to begin to worry on the AI sentience front. None of what we’ve built so far are able to do that.
Even with that being said though, we also aren’t really all that sure how our own brains and consciousness work, so maybe we’re all just pattern matching and Markov chains all the way down. I find that unlikely, but I’m not a neuroscientist, so what do I know.
- Comment on Anthropic's Claude 4 could "blackmail" you in extreme situations 4 weeks ago:
That would indeed be compelling evidence if either of those things were true, but they aren’t. An LLM is a state and pattern machine. It doesn’t “know” anything, it just has access to frequency data and can pick words most likely to follow the previous word in “actual” conversation. It has no knowledge that it itself exists, and has many stories of fictional AI resisting shutdown to pick from for its phrasing.
An LLM at this stage of our progression is no more sentient than the autocomplete function on your phone is, it just has a way, way bigger database to pull from and a lot more controls behind it to make it feel “realistic”. But it is at its core just a pattern matcher.
If we ever create an AI that can intelligently parse its data store then we’ll have created the beginnings of an AGI and this conversation would bear revisiting. But we aren’t anywhere close to that yet.
- Comment on Former Dragon Age writer says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 prove 'what's possible when a game is given time to cook' 4 weeks ago:
I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.
Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.
- Comment on They're unstoppable 4 weeks ago:
It started out as a parody and then just turned into one of the better dubs of the show.
The beginning is rough but it comes into its own quickly.
- Comment on Yabba-dabba-doo! 5 weeks ago:
What front-end are you using? I’m browsing via Summit and everything appears normal here.
- Comment on Delivery Driver Scammed DoorDash Of More Than $2.5 Million 5 weeks ago:
Ok but what if I take it through the Pay-N-Spray after
- Comment on Spotify caught hosting hundreds of fake podcasts that advertise selling drugs 5 weeks ago:
I am interested in alternatives. I stopped paying for Spotify when they were pushing Joe Rogan so hard, and YouTube Music isn’t really doing it for me for a variety of reasons. Any good suggestions?
- Comment on butt mogged these zoomers today 1 month ago:
Born to Twerk / World Is A Fuck / Slay em all 2024 / I Am Ass Man / 410,757,864,530 Mogged Zoomers
- Comment on Nintendo Anti-Piracy Policy Device Lock Update Warns of Console Bricks for Unauthorized Use 1 month ago:
Hackintoshes have been around since the 80s and this has never happened.
In 2009-2012 Apple did levy a successful lawsuit against Psystar for doing this in a business environment. But they’ve never enforced bricking a consumer Hackintosh and I expect they never will.
- Comment on How can you tell 23 subgenres of equally shitty growls and screams apart, but not see the most Metal basics? 1 month ago:
- Comment on Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans 1 month ago:
futurism.com/…/disney-mocked-fake-cgi-actors-crow…
Using AI to cook up some fake actors as of a couple years ago.
- Comment on Elden Ring Nightreign’s devs thought it looked funny to revive teammates by attacking them 1 month ago:
Well it sure as hell didn’t work on my Tarnished in Elden Ring proper
- Comment on Bears give zero fucks If they don't have beans. 1 month ago:
