cygon

@cygon@lemmy.world

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
They always release their “Creation Kit” which is apparently also what the Bethesda employees use to build the quests and NPCs in their games:
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The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven’t done any modding since the Skyrim days).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I think this is really the core of it.

I remember that it took months of discussions, compromises and buttering up specific opposition members to get it passed, and that it was a trimmed-down version of the original Medicare plans.

I wish I could remember where, but when answering a question very similar to the OP’s - perhaps in an interview? - Obama explained that he would have very much liked to tackle two big things: health care and climate, but that his party’s resources were stretched too thin to do both at the same time and that he knew they would loose control of the house in the midtems (2011), so he picked one thing.

Table listing who held the house and the senate during the Obama presidency from 2009 to 2017
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with a skeptical mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) , at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Political map of the US in 1964

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

Search result on DuckDuckGo for anti-conservative t-shirts, all results showing anti-liberal t-shirts

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't people make ai's by making a neuron sim and then scaling it up with a supercomputer to the point where it has a humans number of neurons and then raise it like a human?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Just some thoughts:
- Current LLMs (chat AIs) are “frozen brains.” (Over-)Simplified, the synapses on the AI’s input neurons are given the 2048 prior words (the “context”) and the AI’s output synapses mean a different word each, so the synapse that lights up most strongly is the next word the AI will say. Then the picked word is added to the “context” and the neural network is executed once more for the next next word.
- Coming up with the weights of the synapses takes insane effort (run millions of books through the “context” and look if the AI t predicts the next word correctly, if not, change a random synapse). Afaik, GPT-4 was trained on more than 2000 NVidia A100 GPUs for somewhere around 4 to 7 months, I think they mentioned paying for 7.5 Megawatt hours.
- If you had a super computer that could keep running the AI with live training, the AI’s ability to string up words would likely, and quickly, degrade into incoherence because it would just ingest and repeat whatever went into it. Existing biological brains have these complex mechanisms of distilling experiences and evaluating them in terms of usefulness/success of their own actions.
I think that foundation, that part that makes biological brains put the action/consequence in the foreground of the learning experience, rather than just ingesting, is what eludes us. Perhaps at some future point in time, we could take the initial brain structure that grows in a human as the seed for an AI (but I guess then we’d likely have to simulate all the highly complex traits of real neurons, including mixed chemical and electrical signaling and possibly even quantum-level effects that have been theorized).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the best indie games you've ever played?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Uh… I swear I wanted to contribute just 2 or 3 games, but as I wrote, I kept remembering one gem after another… oh well… :)

Outer Wilds - So hard to describe, it’s an exploration game, but what you’re exploring is a star system going supernova, in a wooden spaceship no less. And a strange way of (not) time travel is also involved, which could be the root of the whole game loop.

Axiom Verge - A platformer that is such a labor of love that it hits just the perfect mix of approachability, exploration, story development and that “huh?” factor where right until the end you’re not sure what your abilities actually mean - i.e. if you could glitch through walls in the real world, would that imply the real world is a simulation?

Stardew Valley - A somehow utterly satisfying farming simulator in the style of the first Harvest Moon games. Such a nice getaway game - it begins with your avatar quitting their office job and moving to a farm inherited from their grandfather. No taxes, no boss, no stress, just rise with the sun, plant, water, harvest and fix. Change your rhythm with the weather and the seasons, investigate charming little mysteries of a beautiful place.

Broforce - Another platformer, this one a bit more brutal. Far over the top 80s action heroes bring freedom to the world, but whether you play as Robocop, Schwarzenegger, McGyver, Snake Plissken, Ripley or another 50 heroes is almost random and each hero has completely different weapons and skills. Destructible environment and even a large Xenomorph outbreak (how the heck did they get the license or grant?).

Protolife - This one uses such a madly simple recipe for complex gameplay. Seen top-down, you’re a robotic loader than can put down dots. That’s all. But certain arrangements of dots are guns, long range guns, flame throwers, area denial, missile silos, barriers and so on. You’re attacked by insect-like creatures, but instead of building tanks, you have to attack via well-placed guns slowly pushing the swarming enemies back.

Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded - Simple top-down shooter where you’re the lone soldier seeking to contain an alien outbreak. Goes for the time-honed recipe of character stat upgrades (speed, health, accuracy) and purchasing weapons and weapon upgrades. The interesting part is the insane hordes you’re up against and that all the corpses stay. It’s not unusual for entire corridors to turn into flesh hallways of blood and carapaces.

Moons of Madness - I hope this is actually indie, the graphics are near AAA level. It’s 50% walking simulator, 50% cosmic horror, set on Mars. You’re an astronaut doing maintenance on an outpost, but rather than go for the “freaky alien attack” recipe, reality itself seems to be somehow bending. Cthulhu, is that you?

Lumencraft - Top-down game. You begin as a miner in an underground base. Something really bad happened to humanity and now you’re digging underground for metal and for “lumen.” To feed the reactor that keeps humanity alive, you have to meet harvesting goals and dig tunnels, but various enemies attack in waves, so you have to spend part of your resources on fortifications and turrets and avoid opening up too many avenues into your bases.

Carrion - 2D platformer-ish. In a secret place, scientists are holding a horrific, tentacled bioweapon locked away, but it escapes. Twist: you are the tentacled bioweapon, slithering through pipes, circumventing security systems and trying to escape from the lab.

Nuclear Blaze - 2D platformer. You’re a fireman sent to contain a fire the broke out in some kind of installation in a forest. But one building has a shaft that leads deep underground where a high-end containment facility is suffering a failure. Takes place in the “SCP” universe and your only tool is a fire hose. Extremely fun trying to extinguish fires in a way where they won’t spread again.

Mothergunship - This is a first-person shooter where you’re boarding and destroying (from the inside out) an army of AI space ships. But instead of a traditional gun, you have gun parts you can stick together. How about a triple rocket launcher with two shotguns in the middle? Or a shield generating laser with a sawblade attache to it, and maybe two shotguns just to be sure? It doesn’t grow old with new weapon parts being introduced right until the very end.

Space Run - 2D base building. You’re a mercenary cargo pilot fending off space pirates. But you don’t do it by controlling a turret, instead, your spaceship is a building surface and you have to build the right kind of engines, turrets, shields and power generators (in mid-flight no less) to be able to shoot down incoming rocks and pirate ships. Extremely well balanced and fun.

Creeper World - 3D real-time strategy. But your enemy is not actually present on the map, you’re just fighting a simulation of liquid, a gooey slime that pours out of several spots. You have to keep shooting, bombarding and containing the splashing, pouring slime until you can neutralize the slime outlets. The story is cool, too. The slime is actually some extinct species “gift” to the universe which dissolves everything into data, transmitted to some eternal storage space at the center of the universe.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Politics] Have phobia, will travel⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
While I’m in none of these groups, having lived survived the rock’n roll-, black mass- / satanic(1)-, killer videogame-, terrorism-, social justice- / SJW-, safe space-, socialism-/communism-, antifa-, cabal-, satanic(2)-, CRT- and woke-panic, I feel underrepresented.