skulblaka
@skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on How to hold onto a subway pole 2 days ago:
- Comment on Amazing. 2 days 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 days 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"! 5 days 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"! 5 days 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"! 5 days 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 6 days 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* 1 week 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... 1 week ago:
- Comment on Anthropic's Claude 4 could "blackmail" you in extreme situations 1 week 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 1 week 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' 1 week 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 2 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! 2 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 2 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 2 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on what are girls 3 weeks ago:
🤷 More for the rest of us
- Comment on When you think about it The Sun is actually at the very bottom. 3 weeks ago:
Today OP is learning about a “local floor”
This is also the same sort of thing that brings us the terrifying concept of False Vacuum Decay
- Comment on Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings 3 weeks ago:
It is, yes.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Yes, but, how does one actually develop “a good bullshit detector”? We all think we have one of those. Especially people who don’t. And thinking that when it’s not true is the hook, line and sinker that gets people deeply into dangerous conspiracies.
- Comment on Cardinals most likely to be the pope 4 weeks ago:
Hey, I resemble that remark.
- Comment on What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games? 4 weeks ago:
This was me lmao. On my first playthrough of Morrowind as a teenager I dicked around and did everything except the main quest for ages. Around level 18 I decided to actually progress the main quest. Hasphat, check. Arkngthand, no sweat. Talk to Sharn Gra-Muzgob, she says to fetch the Skull of Llevule Andrano. Cool, go to Andrano’s tomb, looks kind of familiar. Where is the Skull of Llevule Andrano? Cause it sure ain’t here in his tomb. Whoopsie.
Never found the skull, never progressed the quest, had to start a new character to actually experience the main story. I wonder how many potential Nerevarines failed to ascend due to missing minor quest items. Wish I could ask em that inside the Cavern of the Incarnate.
- Comment on What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games? 4 weeks ago:
There are more than one occasion where NPCs just straight up lie to you in quest directions though. I can’t think of it off the top of my head but I remember it existing because I complained about it on a forum.
On one hand - great worldbuilding! “Local dumbass gives you bad directions” is a funny and memorable point on top of what might otherwise be a forgettable side quest. On the other hand, I spent the better part of four hours looking for whatever egg mine or ancestral tomb or whatever it was he asked me to find before getting fed up and having UESP tell me “lol no actually it’s off in this complete other direction”, and I’m pretty sure I assassinated that NPC after I turned in his quest.
- Comment on Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) 5 weeks ago:
Local speech to text has been easy to do for at least a decade and then you’re just firing off a text file to HQ to add keywords to a user file. These days an AI will likely parse the text to find recommendable products, ten years ago you’d have just had a gigantic list of all your partners’ brand names and desired key trigger phrases in a database and run the conversation text against the database and look for matches. Super easy to accomplish. Updating someone’s ad preferences 15-30 minutes after they talk about a product may as well be considered real time.
