AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Hades 2's Melinoë can now run through Zagreus' underworld escape from the original Hades, thanks to modders 5 days ago:
Man, I love modders. They make me so happy. I probably won’t ever install this mod, but I’m glad that it, and the people who made it, exist.
- Comment on Squad Goals 1 week ago:
Stuff like this is pretty context dependent, and vibes based. Did it feel like this happened because people recognised that you belonged to a marginalised group, and were earnestly making an attempt to subvert systemic oppression you may face as a researcher by raising you up? Or did it feel like you were being instrumentalised, boiled down to a 2D representation of who you are in order to further the aims of that conference and/or research group?
- Comment on WHY??? 1 week ago:
I feel like I just got goatsed by Saturn
- Comment on Do you cheat in video games? 1 week ago:
Sometimes. I tend to have quite hard lines about what feels like acceptable levels of cheating though.
To use Terraria as an example, I remember going mad searching for a lava charm, and I ended up using a map viewer to check whether my world actually had one. It didn’t so I used a save editor to give me the charm. This part was a mistake, and felt like the kind of cheating that makes the game less fun in a slippery slope kind of way. I regretted what I did.
In future games, I would sometimes check to see if a Lava charm existed on my world if I had spent a while searching for it to no avail, and if there wasn’t one, I’d try going to a different world. If there was one in my world, I’d try to not pay attention to where in my world the chest(s) with the lava charm(s) were (and in some cases, I’d get a friend to confirm whether one existed on my world, so I wouldn’t even know the rough area where the chest was. Sometimes cheats can make the game more fun and engaging, if used wisely and in moderation.
- Comment on Help me decide what I should name my game! Currently Country Architect, it turns out that "country" has a double meaning in English that I was not aware of 1 week ago:
Ooh, I like this
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 1 week ago:
If they were, it would be extremely foolish to answer your question honestly.
Even if they did say yes, you wouldn’t believe them anyway, so what’s the point in asking?
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 1 week ago:
A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).
I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.
It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 2 weeks ago:
Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.
- Comment on What did I forget? 2 weeks ago:
I love that you have multiple people replying to you asking for technical details on how you ranked the flag entropy. This is how you know that you are amongst your people here <3
- Comment on Paradox Takes the Blame for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Sales Flop, Announces $37 Million Write-Down 2 weeks ago:
Were you running it with the unofficial patch? I don’t remember what it was that was causing me problems, but it’s possible that was it.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 18 comments
- Comment on Creator of Original Thomas the Tank Engine Mod for Skyrim Puts Thomas in Morrowind in Defiance of 'Legal Threats' 2 weeks ago:
"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.
In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.
This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”
Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic
- Comment on What's the coolest organic compound, chat? 2 weeks ago:
I was going to comment this, so I’m glad to see that you beat me to it. Benzene is so cool.
Meme: Virgin cyclohexane in chair conformation vs. Chad benzene, a planar ring
- Comment on Paradox Takes the Blame for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Sales Flop, Announces $37 Million Write-Down 2 weeks ago:
To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.
Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.
- Comment on Thank Mozilla for Killing Localization on Support Mozilla (And Replacing Human Contributions With AI Bots) 2 weeks ago:
The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla
- Comment on Insulin 2 weeks ago:
Symbols are powerful things. I’m not an American, but something that surprised me with Mangione was how people on the left and the right seemed to support him. It was a rare case of example of political unity amongst regular people.
- Comment on Memory Foam doesn't actually "Remember," it just deviates from the base and goes back. It's more like Forgetting Foam! 2 weeks ago:
Not all memory foams are equal. I’ve found that quality makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, the good stuff can get pretty pricey. It sounds like you’re talking about memory foam insoles, and I know that a lot of those tend to be the rubbish kind
- Comment on Labcoat! 2 weeks ago:
This particular dog is fortunate enough to have shoes
- Comment on Labcoat! 2 weeks ago:
Absolutely they do
- Comment on Labcoat! 2 weeks ago:
I would imagine that there isn’t anything hazardous to that degree. I studied biochemistry, and I can think of a lot of different research areas that would include minimally hazardous materials (e.g. phosphate buffer)
- Comment on Day 491 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 3 weeks ago:
Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.
- Comment on It never hurts to practice when you have the chance 3 weeks ago:
"taint’ is an informal word for the perineum
- Comment on Japanese court orders Cloudflare to pay $3.2 million over manga piracy 3 weeks ago:
I think the problem is that so many of our laws (especially intellectual property laws) seem to be ill equipped to deal with the reality of our increasingly digital world.
For example, recently there was an example of “worst person you know makes a good point” when 4chan and Kiwifarms opposed the imposition of the UK’s recent Online Safety Act (OSA). They argued that they don’t operate in the UK, none of their employees are based in the UK, none of their services are hosted in the UK, so under what jurisdiction can they be fined for not complying with the OSA? The UK’s stance was that the OSA does apply to them because some of the users of those sites are from the UK, but the counterpoint to that is that it shouldn’t be 4chan’s legal obligation to police their users in this respect. UK users would be beholden to UK law, Nepalese users to Nepal’s laws, US users to US law etc. — it isn’t reasonable to expect a website to have a comprehensive understanding and compliance of the laws of every country that their users belong to. They argued that if the UK has beef with UK users going to a non-UK website that doesn’t comply with the OSA, then they should take that up with entities based in the UK (such as ISPs).
The lawsuit was doomed from the getgo, because sovereign immunity means that they could sue a country, but it raised some super interesting points about jurisdiction and legal compliance. Buying and selling stolen goods is illegal, but what about if the person buying couldn’t have reasonably known they were stolen? There’s plenty of case law around that question, but does the same burden of evidence and “reasonableness” apply in an online context? Is embedding stolen content that’s hosted on a different site seen the same as directly hosting that? Let’s say that linking to stolen content is agreed to be the same as hosting that content directly — what about linking to a place that links to stolen content?
Even if we agree that buying and selling stolen goods is illegal, actually applying that to an online context gets messy real quick. Case law can be sparse, or contradictory in some cases. I share your view that intellectual property and copyright are bullshit, and I think part of what makes them so bullshit is how ill-suited they are to our current reality. There’s always been a tension between the intention of copyright and the effects in practice, but I feel like that’s gotten worse over the years. I don’t know what a good solution would be, but I know for certain that the current system isn’t working
- Comment on 2B email addresses and 1.3B passwords compromised in data breaches 3 weeks ago:
The best way to keep yourself safe from stuff like this is to use a password manager, and to generate a new password for each account.
Starting using a password manager is one of the single most powerful improvements to my wellbeing in years. It’s so nice to not have to do the “Forgot my password” process for a site I rarely use, only to discover when creating a new password that the site has weird rules around password requirements (explaining why none of the variations for my standard password at the time worked to login).
I use Bitwarden
Most people on this community probably already use a password manager, but if you don’t, then this comment is for you
- Comment on While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago 4 weeks ago:
Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.
I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.
I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.
- Comment on The Rockstar Workers Fired Before They Could Finish GTA 6 [People Make Games 19:17] 4 weeks ago:
Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach
- Comment on Wikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API, and stop scraping 4 weeks ago:
From skimming that linked page, I think that this download perhaps doesn’t include recent pages? Because in the section talking about enterprise stuff, it mentions the paid API for recent articles
- Comment on Nvidia's Jensen Huang: 'China is going to win the AI race,' 5 weeks ago:
You win by acknowledging that AI/Machine Learning research has existed long before this bubble existed, and is continuing to happen outside of that bubble. Most of what we call AI nowadays is based on neural networks (that’s what Geoffrey Hinton and others got a recent nobel prize for), but that’s not the only way to go about the problem, and for years now, there have been researchers pointing out problems like hallucinations and diminishing returns from increasing the amount of data you feed to a model.
An example of one such researcher is Song Chun-Zhu, who has recently moved back to China because he was finding it increasingly difficult to do research he wanted (i.e. outside of the current AI bubble) within the US. That linked article is a bit of a puff piece, in that it is a tad too mythologising of him, but I think he’s a good example of what productive AI research looks like — especially because he used to work on the “big data” kind of AI, before realising its inherent limits and readjusting his approach accordingly.
He’s one of the names that’s on my watch list because even for people who aren’t directly building on his research, he comes up a lot in research that is also burnt out on neural nets
- Comment on GTA 6 dev Rockstar says recent firings were due to leaks of "confidential information" and were "in no way related to people's right to join a union" 5 weeks ago:
What does OC mean in this context?
- Comment on My block list in a nutshell: 5 weeks ago:
I think the analogy still applies. There are loads of people who I interact with who say things I don’t want to hear/profound disagree with. The block list includes people with whom it doesn’t feel viable to have a discussion with without things descending into flames.
