TheChurn

@TheChurn@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Creative Assembly Reportedly Working On A Total War: Star Wars Game⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm not sure I'd trust modern CA to do Med3 justice. The new style of Total War is just a different beast from the sublime RTW/Med2 era.

  Lots of little things changed, and it just 'hits different'. Probably the biggest difference is just that every single fight after the first 20 turns will be a 20 stack vs a 20 stack, and every single battle is life or death for that army. It makes the campaign much faster paced - declare war, wipe stack, capture cities for 3 turns until the AI magics up another 20 stack.

  In the original Med2, since there wasn't automatic replenishment, there were often battles between smaller stacks, even in late game, as they were sent from the backline to reinforce the large armies on the front. Led to some of my greatest memories trying to keep some random crossbowmen and cavalry alive against some ambushing enemy infantry they wandered into. The need for manual reinforcement led to natural pauses in wars and gave the losing side a chance to regroup without relying on the insane AI bonuses of the modern TW games - and I do mean insane; they'll have multiple full stacks supplied from a single settlement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Server as heating device - how do I do this?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There's no real complexity. Computers are first and foremost electric space heaters, a negligible amount of energy is used to perform computation.

  If you would be heating a room with resistive electric heating, a computer drawing the same wattage can do the same job while also, in theory, doing some useful work.

  If you are just evaluating heating options, heat pumps use less energy to output the same heat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YOU.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don't play.

  Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

  Other than that I really couldn't tell you. I don't think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

  Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YOU.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mostly just pay for it because I've used it for ages and definitely get more value out of it than the subscription cost. I don't think I use a single nitro feature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reflections on Xenoblade Chronicles⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Got the second years ago when it launched because I was looking for a new rpg to play. Bounced off it immediately because the gameplay was far too passive -- I didn't feel like I was doing anything -- and the fucking quote spam POPPY WILL PROTECT MASTERPON is branded on my soul.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft wants to hide the 'Sign out' button in Windows 11 behind a Microsoft 365 ad⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Linux and Nvidia really need to sort out their shit so I can fully dump windows.

  Luckily the AI hype is good for something in this regard, since I running gpus on Linux servers is suddenly much more important.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The first trailer for #ELDENRING Shadow of the Erdtree will be revealed in 16 hours. Join us at 15:00 UTC.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Dark Souls 2 DLCs are some of the best content in all of Souls. While the original game has some level design issues, the DLCs are sublime.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reason for high refresh rates?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

  These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

  An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

  The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

  The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

  To make a crude concrete example:

  Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

  Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

  Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

  One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

  Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smaug-72B-v0.1: The New Open-Source LLM Roaring to the Top of the Leaderboard⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Every billion parameters needs about 2 GB of VRAM - if using bfloat16 representation. 16 bits per parameter, 8 bits per byte -> 2 bytes per parameter.

  1 billion parameters ~ 2 Billion bytes ~ 2 GB.

  From the name, this model has 72 Billion parameters, so ~144 GB of VRAM

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DragonFire: UK fires high-power laser at aerial targets for first time - with 'intense beam of light' able to cut through drones⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A good mirror reflects more than 99% of incident light, effectively increasing the amount of power the laser needs to destroy the target by a factor of 100.

  This isn't the real concern, however. Fog, dust, clouds, and rain are quite common on the damp and dusty sphere we live on, and they would all strongly attenuate the beam power and greatly reduce the effective range.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many countries in the world “developing” and poor, while essentially only Western countries have a high standard of living?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond's book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They say in an infinite multiverse versions of you exist. Yet there's an infinity of fractional numbers between 1 and 2 with no whole number 3 between, so infinity can exist without every possibility.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it's not spontaneous

  Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

  So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

  The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

  There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

  Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the 'spreading out' of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

  Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

  Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose's views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They say in an infinite multiverse versions of you exist. Yet there's an infinity of fractional numbers between 1 and 2 with no whole number 3 between, so infinity can exist without every possibility.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.

  A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn’t violate a damn thing with our system of physics.

  This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.

  I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose's theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it "seems weird" for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AIs can guess where Reddit users live and how much they earn⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Explaining what happens in a neural net is trivial. All they do is approximate (generally) nonlinear functions with a long series of multiplications and some rectification operations.

  That isn't the hard part, you can track all of the math at each step.

  The hard part is stating a simple explanation for the semantic meaning of each operation.

  When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: "First I will draw a diagram out in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem", and so on.

  Neural nets don't appear to solve problems that way, each atomic operation does not have that semantic meaning. That is the root of all the reporting about how they are such 'black boxes' and researchers 'don't understand' how they work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Total War Warhammer 3 devs will remove Steam users starting boycotts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  They aren't the good guys. A lot (too much if you ask the community) of the fiction is told from the perspective of the imperium/space Marines, but that doesn't make them the good guys.

  They go around saying things like "The rewards of tolerance are treachery and betrayal." They clearly are not meant to be the good guys, even in their own stories.

  The problem is media literacy is so poor that far too many people look at quotes like that and think "that's a good point". Even the creators have put out press releases about how all the fascists are missing the point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did there need to be a vote?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Global North/South is a socio-economic and political grouping.

  Developed countries = global north
  Developing = global south

  It does originate in geography, as the vast majority of wealth and high-tech industry is in the geographic North, but countries like Aus and NZ also fit, despite being South of the equator.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mistral 7B AI Model Released Under Apache 2.0 License⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  how much VRAM you need to run this model

  It will depend on the representation of the parameters. Most models support bfloat16, where each parameters is 16-bits (2 Bytes). For these models, every Billion parameters needs roughly 2 GB of VRAM.

  It is possible to reduce the memory footprint by using 8 bits for each param, and some models support this, but they start to get very stupid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it recommended to wear a face mask when riding bicycle around cars?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Those without respiratory issues don't have oxygenation issues while wearing masks.

  The same air is going into your lungs, the only difference is your diaphragm has to work harder due to the filtering effect of the mask. If it can't manage that, then you are likely already on oxygen due to low tidal volume and chronic hypoxia.

  You can buy a pulse oximeter from CVS for like $20 and test this yourself if you don't believe me.