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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • But it isn’t encoding knowledge, it’s encoding word correlations. That’s how it can get things wrong like saying fat32 won’t be good for a 64GB removable drive because fat32 only has a 2TB address space.

    Or how it can get something wrong and when you point it out, it immediately sees how it was wrong. And I realize that that sounds human, but the way it gets there is very different. It’s predicting responses based off word correlations, not using knowledge recall to apply facts and relations known about the topics and generate responses from that.


  • Yeah, I don’t think they would have been like modern slaves but more like bully/bullied relationships where those at the bottom aren’t forced to do labour but get targetted for various forms of abuse, including sexual, which would have sometimes resulted in a child.

    They probably wouldn’t be abused by everyone in the group. Other apes like chimps show sympathy to individuals that get picked on by more dominant individuals, so I’d expect some of us were like that back then, too. But other apes also demonstrate that some individuals can just be assholes or otherwise decent but can get in bad moods.



  • Hate to break it to you but quality of data isn’t the fundamental problem with LLMs. It’s that they are trying to use statistics to encode entire thought processes into hidden variables from conversation snippets. They want to use statistics to go from many individual interactions to a large model, and then use that model to predict individual interactions again. Which you can do with statistics, but it’s predicting the average text that follows the prompt, not the correct text (it has no concept of correctness; whenever it “talks” about it, that’s just the average text that follows, not any particular insight into what’s correct or even how it works).

    That’s not to say that the quality of the training data has no impact; it can have a huge impact. I’m just saying that even if the training data was perfect, the LLM will still get things wrong in its output.


  • I think it’s possible to do that, but just don’t expect the people on the other platforms to get excited about it. Using a phone as a primary gaming device is partially about mobility but mostly about budget (at least going by how I see it). Someone who already has a gaming PC or console doesn’t really want mobile games. Personally, while I used to have more of a variety of games on my phone, currently my only game is chess, despite considering myself a big gamer.

    Blizzard’s mistake wasn’t in making a mobile game, it was thinking they could excite a room full of PC gamers with news about a mobile version of a big PC game, showing just how out of touch their leadership was. Like it should have been obvious that that presentation wasn’t going up be taken well and should have either just been a booth at blizzcon or an announcement that said “mobile game” right from the start. I forget where in the timeline that fell compared to their other blunders like WC3 reforged replacing the still superior WC3, but IMO it made those other ones more predictable because it was a clear sign their leadership was just chasing the money without a good idea of what gave them fans in the first place.

    If xbox handles it better, it could work out better for them. Not for winning me as a customer, but for increasing users who do like to game on mobile environments.

    Diablo Immortal was successful for blizzard on its own, though it’s hard to quantify lost business because of it (especially when it wasn’t the only thing hurting business for blizzard).





  • The DNA presence only confirms that there was interbreeding happening, not what kind of conditions they were happening under. Knowing what I know about our species, especially from the early days, IMO its equally likely that we intermingled via war/conquest (in the form it would have existed for hunter/gatherer societies) and incorporated via slavery. My guess is that history contains examples of both (peaceful and violent exchanges) for each of Neanderthal, homo erectus, and Denisovians, plus maybe others that history isn’t as aware of, depending on how diverse hominids got before homo sapiens got settled in everywhere.

    Our species is capable of the full spectrum from good to evil and even today we have a large amount of psychopaths in leadership positions.

    Though we are the first species to be aware that other species have gone extinct and wonder how much of that was directly because of us. And it’s not like any homo sapiens that exist today have any responsibility for what happened to species that went extinct before recorded history began anywhere on this planet.







  • On that note, it’s possible this is just one of the competitors deliberately breaking one. Not that a failed system isn’t plausible, but it’s just as plausible that one of valve’s competitors is trying to create FUD.

    Time will tell I guess, but it reminds me of all the complaints about the radeon 5700 XT when all I saw was instability caused by my mobo thinking it could just enable PCIe (x+1) when it was only engineered for PCIe x (forget if it was 3 and 4 or 4 and 5), and it worked great after I updated the bios so it stopped doing that. It was hard to tell what complaints were legitimate and I was just lucky to avoid vs what was being amplified because AMD was getting back in the competition and nvidia didn’t like that.


  • There’s two main reasons why I like physical media:

    1. Longevity. If the maker/publisher of the game doesn’t want to support it anymore or goes broke, I still have the game.
    2. Used game market. I’ve got a backlog of PS4 games I got cheap because they still existed after demand went down, so prices went down.

    Steam meets both of those in different ways.

    1. Any game I’ve purchased on Steam has remained available to install, even though some of them aren’t available for sale anymore via Steam. If a publisher folds, Steam can still serve their files to people who bought the game before it folded. This might change in the future and there might be exceptions where a publisher went to court to stop Steam from serving the files (not that I know of any cases of this, just acknowledging the possibility exists here while it doesn’t for physical games you already own), but so far so good.
    2. Steam sales are often better than used game sales. Sure, not all publishers participate in them, but my steam backlog dwarfs my console backlog because I can often buy multiple games for the price of one used disc game.

    They are both ultimately in it for greed, but a different kind of greed. Sony wants the short term make most profits this quarter every quarter, even if this quarter’s strategy hurts next quarter, that’s a problem for next quarter.

    Valve seems to at least understand that not taking its users for granted and forcing shitty options on them to make a quick buck will mean they are more willing to continue spending money on their shit.

    Also, Valve didn’t come in trying to end physical media, they were a digital service from the start. Similarly, I had no problem with some games on the PS store not having physical releases and I’ve even bought a few. My issue is that the physical disc drive is one of the main reasons I even have a ps5, so saying they won’t be doing them anymore mostly just means that the ps6 won’t be as interesting to me. I’m not even really mad, just disappointed and moving on.


  • Not for treason. While the union was on the right side of the slavery issue, I can’t agree with the whole imperialist “you can’t leave this nation, we rule you” stance. Governance should be consensual IMO, though I’m not opposed to military interventions to deal with evil shit like slavery or refusing to allow those who want out to leave (but not to enforce economic advantages).

    Though ultimately it doesn’t really matter and the strongest militaries, intelligence agencies, and civil obedience forces will decide in the end, as they always have.