Eccitaze

@Eccitaze@yiffit.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is gonna turn into the gamer version of “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy” isn’t it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brand recognition⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Brought to you by the American National Automation Laboratory Corp?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, suuuuure you weren’t.

  Note that the proof also generalizes to any form of creating an AI by training it on a dataset, not just LLMs. But sure, we’ll absolutely develop an entirely new approach to cognitive science in a few years, we’re definitely not boiling the planet and funneling enough money to end world poverty several times over into a scientific dead end!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You literally were LMAO

  Other than that, we will keep incrementally improving our technology and it’s only a matter of time untill we get there. May take 5 years, 50 or 500 but it seems pretty inevitable to me.

  Literally a direct quote. In what world is this not talking about LLMs?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you read the article, or the actual research paper? They present a mathematical proof that any hypothetical method of training an AI that produces an algorithm that performs better than random chance could also be used to solve a known intractible problem, which is impossible with all known current methods. This means that any algorithm we can produce that works by training an AI would run in exponential time or worse.

  The paper authors point out that this also has severe implications for current AI, too–since the current AI-by-learning method that underpins all LLMs is fundamentally NP-hard and can’t run in polynomial time, “the sample-and-time requirements grow non-polynomially (e.g. exponentially or worse) in n.” They present a thought experiment of an AI that handles a 15-minute conversation, assuming 60 words are spoken per minute (keep in mind the average is roughly 160). The resources this AI would require to process this would be 60*15 = 900. The authors then conclude:

  “Now the AI needs to learn to respond appropriately to conversations of this size (and not just to short prompts). Since resource requirements for AI-by-Learning grow exponentially or worse, let us take a simple exponential function O(2n ) as our proxy of the order of magnitude of resources needed as a function of n. 2^900 ∼ 10^270 is already unimaginably larger than the number of atoms in the universe (∼10^81 ). Imagine us sampling this super-astronomical space of possible situations using so-called ‘Big Data’. Even if we grant that billions of trillions (10 21 ) of relevant data samples could be generated (or scraped) and stored, then this is still but a miniscule proportion of the order of magnitude of samples needed to solve the learning problem for even moderate size n.”

  That’s why LLMs are a dead end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fallout London - I just can't anymore⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I gave up on it for now when the questline involving the NPC learning to write broke, and then I started crashing to desktop (without any logs anywhere, either in the Buffout directory or even in Windows’ Event Viewer) every time I left the Swan or fast traveled directly to it, even though traveling to another point literally fifty feet south worked just fine. And since there’s no logs describing the crash, I have no idea how to fix it.

  I could probably fix it by uninstalling and re-downloading it again, but I have a goddamn data cap that my roommate already blows through every month with the fucking massive updates Fallout 76 has taken to pushing out, I have zero desire to download 60 GB of data (30 GB base game + 30 GB FOLON) every fucking time I sneeze wrong and make the game start crashing again. =|

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pacific Drive | Drive Your Way Fall 2024 Update⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s pretty okay. If you like the gameplay loop of scavenging parts to maintain and upgrade your car, and don’t mind the roguelite elements, it’s pretty fun, and it does a good job of creating tension–there’s been multiple occasions where I wanted to loot more but I was out of time and likely to die if I stayed much longer.

  The world building is immaculate, but IMO unfortunately the plot doesn’t really pay off, and the ending isn’t… super satisfying. It does enough to drive you along (no pun intended). The best part of the game is easily the soundtrack, and the best song in the soundtrack is easily The Freeze.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"It's better to piss in the sink than to sink in the piss"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you drop trou and stand in front if a toilet every time you need to toot the flesh whistle?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Final Fantasy Creator Reveals Which Entry He Thinks Is 'Most Complete', and It's Not Final Fantasy 7⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you talking about the chibi models vs. more realistic models? I think that was an artifact of an FF trope left over from the NES era where the world sprites were limited to one tile due to NES hardware limitations while the battle sprites were more detailed 1x2 tiles, and this was kept all the way up to FF6 where they finally used the same sprite for world and battles.

  I have no clue why they went back to using different/less detailed models for world exploration in FF7 (if I had to guess they were unfamiliar with the PSX hardware and the chibi models used fewer polygons), but that go a long way to explain why the FMVs sometimes used different models–IIRC, the FMVs with chibi models played directly from the field, and the ones with more detailed models had some kind of scene transition into them, or otherwise were used for major plot beats. It’s good they abandoned this entirely with FF8 onwards, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't joke about daddy⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In the show just before these were taken, Omni-Man got in a fight with another hero named The Immortal, where The Immortal went for the eyes and tried to blind him by gouging them out. It definitely hurt him, but it didn’t work, and Omni-Man ripped The Immortal in half shortly afterwards. (He got better.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"30 minutes or it's free" back then was wild⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And run red lights, and drive recklessly and…,

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"30 minutes or it's free" back then was wild⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, and also how to orient yourself and the direction you were going by the progression of the address numbers–for example, if you were on Sunset Blvd SE, you knew address numbers increased as you drove south and east.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"30 minutes or it's free" back then was wild⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, I delivered pizza for the Hut around the same time. Big ol’ map of the area divided into sectors, each order listed which sector the address was in. I’d write directions on the back of the order slip, and go off into the night with nothing but a flashlight. First day I got a lecture by the manager on how to navigate by address and tell which side of the street a house was on, I learned more about navigating that day than in the entire rest of my life.

  Sometimes I miss those days and wish I could be 19 and driving my tiny Honda Civic through the highlands again, listening to video game songs downloaded from OCRemix on my little MP3 player plugged into the car audio with a tape adapter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would America be as divided if Trump lost to Hillary in 2016?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, there are so many moments I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and yell at various people while shaking their shoulders.

  For the love of God, Barack, don’t make fun of Trump at the White House correspondent’s dinner, he’ll run for president to dismantle all you’ve built up in revenge and HE WILL WIN.

  Please, Ruth, I beg you to step down now while there’s still an opportunity for you to be replaced with another liberal justice. If you don’t, your legacy will be undone I’m under four years and it will herald the end of American democracy.

  Please, Barack, don’t let them steal a supreme court seat like this, you have to force the issue while there’s still time or else you will watch the heritage foundation gloat about the second American revolution against the left while a corrupt court anoints the president as above the law of the land.

  For the love of God, Biden, please run in 2016, I know you’re still grieving over the death of your son, but if you don’t you’ll be grieving over the death of your entire country.

  For the love of God, Hillary, please step aside and let Sanders be the candidate, I know you agreed with Obama that he would give you SoS in return for you running after him but the Republican propaganda machine has made you toxic.

  Barack, you can’t sweep this Russian interference under the rug, it’s too important to ignore, please!

  I beg you, Hillary, don’t ignore the rust belt, your numbers are weaker than they should be there and they are too important to lose, the literal future of democracy is at stake.

  For fuck’s sake, Comey, don’t reopen this stupid email investigation two weeks before the election, we both know there’s nothing on that fucking laptop. You need to shut down the trumpy faction before they leak its existence because they are trying to interfere with the election, and if Trump wins he will reward you with a pink slip while gleefully dragging the country to a dictatorship.

  This timeline could’ve been so easily avoided, if only one variable out of dozens was different. But here we are, with me wondering where I can even flee to in order to escape the coming dictatorship.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would America be as divided if Trump lost to Hillary in 2016?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The hush money payments were before the election so they were still felonies. It’s possible Trump wouldn’t have bothered hiding them like he did if he lost, but in any case there wouldn’t have been the appetite to prosecute him.

  As for the coup, he absolutely would have tried it, definitely through filing lawsuits, and probably up to the same fake electors scheme and the riot, but it’s debatable how far he would’ve gotten. Definitely not as far as he did in reality, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would America be as divided if Trump lost to Hillary in 2016?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hoo boy, it’s a toughie. On the one hand, Trump would still be around. He also wouldn’t be in as much legal peril as he is now (it’s likely there wouldn’t have been an appetite to prosecute him over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and the classified documents case would have never happened to begin with since he wouldn’t have had access). But he almost definitely WOULD have tried to pull off another insurrection similar to Jan 6th–he was foreshadowing that he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost even back in 2016, using the same language as he did in 2020 before he launched his coup attempt.

  The world where Trump doesn’t attempt a coup isn’t very interesting, at least for this thought experiment–he slinks off, continues shitposting about Hillary on Twitter, but likely doesn’t try to run again (or loses in the primary because he’s a sore loser). Everyone ignores his hush money payments in the interest of “statesmanship,” and at best he becomes a minor kingmaker in the party apparatus. MAGA withers on the vine, and we largely continue with the late Obama administration status quo.

  The world where he attempts a coup is much more interesting. The real question is, what would have changed after the failed insurrection attempt? It’s highly unlikely it would have succeeded or even gotten anywhere as close as it did, since a lot of the original plan relied on access to the levers of power (I.e. being able to withhold security to let the rioters overrun the Capitol). But how would everyone react to it long-term? In this timeline, Republicans genuinely distanced themselves from Trump and Jan 6th at first, likely out of shock over the realization that they were actually in danger and the very real fear that they could end up hurt or killed. But as the shock wore off, Republicans started shuffling back to MAGA as the propaganda machine did its work to downplay and normalize the failed coup, and they realized that their base saw Jan 6th as a good thing.

  In a theoretical timeline where Trump tries a coup in 2016, it depends on how far Trump gets before he fails. If he’s thwarted to the point where he doesn’t (or can’t) hold the rally that stormed the Capitol, then nothing really comes of it at all–it becomes a footnote in history that is only cared about by political historians, pub trivia enthusiasts, and people who like to talk about politics on the internet. If he gets to the point where he holds a rally, but the rally is prevented from interfering with the certification process (complete with provocative images of cops in riot gear swinging at MAGA rioters), it’s likely that this downplaying and normalization would have been ironically amplified by virtue of the coup attempt being less successful. Without the visceral fear of hiding from rioters, Republicans would have no reason to distance themselves from the attempt, and they would almost immediately start using it as fodder to attack the new Clinton administration. In short, the hypothetical coup attempt would become another Benghazi scandal for Clinton–something that she had little real involvement in and largely wasn’t her fault, but that she gets blamed for anyway. Trump, meanwhile, would remain largely in the same position as in 2015–the dominant force in the party.

  Aside from that, the court wouldn’t be as openly corrupt as it is now. It’d be filled by a moderate Clinton appointee if democrats have the 51 votes to abolish the filibuster for supreme court appointees (or held open by McConnell otherwise), and when RBG dies her replacement is decided by whoever wins the 2020 election. Roe v. Wade would still exist, the chevron deference would still be the law of the land, and we wouldn’t have the terrifying prospect of legally sanctioned presidential death squads.

  Overall, I think we would be largely in line with the status quo of 2014-2015. Not great, with a worrying trend towards fascism and an establishment largely too busy huffing their own farts to address the vast majority of problems facing us, but a LOT better than where we are right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doom: The Dark Ages is introducing big changes to combat because id Software came to one core realization: "Every projectile mattered in the original Doom"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨tech support⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m utterly blessed because my personal area of coverage is in the hardware and storage systems (disks, RAID, filesystems, virtualization, etc.) so I am way more likely to interact with business users instead of individual home users, which is where the vast majority of the “I have XX decades of experience” types come from. They’re also generally a lot more willing to listen to me because if I’m talking to them it’s fair odds that they fucked up bad enough that they’re at risk of losing all their data, and that’s usually enough to get them to shut up.

  But god, some of the tickets I’ve seen from other employees…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨tech support⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, any time someone mentions how many decades of experience they have in IT, it means they either:

  • Think that clicking the Facebook button on their desktop and finding their Downloads folder qualifies as experience in IT

  • Have decades of actual IT experience, but think everything still works like they did in the 90s. Yeah, maybe you were an IT expert at one point, but you never bothered to keep your skills fresh, you geezer.

  In either case, they think they know better than the lowly flunkie trying to help them, and trying to get them to actually listen to you and “please sir just upload debug logs, I beg you, no those aren’t debug logs, I gave you the instructions to generate debug logs three times already, maybe things will be different after the fourth time, there’s a literal KB article with step by step instructions to sync your photo library, no I won’t call you to handhold you through this, I’d literally just be reading the steps in the article” is pure suffering.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon wants to ride a zeppelin⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s amazing what proper regulations that are designed to prioritize safety over profit can accomplish, and how quickly stark examples of the dangers start happening when those regulations are sidestepped or dismantled…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Solve a puzzle for me⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I see you read Piers Anthony too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ah, Yes! AI Will Surely Save Us All!⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  my company announced today that they were going to start a phased rollout where AI would provide first responses to tickets, with it initially being “reviewed” by humans with the eventual goal being it just sending responses unsupervised. The strength of my "OH HELL NO" derailed the entire meeting for a solid 15 minutes lmao

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sega Dreamcast⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Funny, I thought of mentioning Crash Bandicoot, but when I put myself into the shoes of 12-year-old me, the single game that came to mind when I thought PlayStation was Final Fantasy 7 more than anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sega Dreamcast⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m no game designer or coder so I’m just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but… Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a “polygon” it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.

  …yeah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sega Dreamcast⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn’t access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.

  Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Battle Grouse⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This bird definitely listens exclusively to metal bands from Nordic regions featuring an opera singer dressed like an ice queen backed by instruments that sound like they just got dragged through a tar pit

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Basically, companies are required to pay for unemployment insurance that funds the government’s unemployment benefits system. If you lay someone off, the employee files for unemploent, and gets paid a portion of their weekly salary while they look for another job (the amount you get paid and whether there’s any additional requirements varies from state to state, with Democrat-controlled states usually being more generous, but generally you have to show you’re actively seeking a new job), and the employer pays a bigger unemployment insurance rate to compensate for the additional burden the former employee is now placing on the government benefits system.

  However, if you’re fired for cause–say, you get caught stealing from the cash register–then the employer can contest your unemployment. If the employer can show you were fired for a good reason, the employee can be denied unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn’t have to pay extra unemployment insurance. This meeting is the company trying to cook up a justification for firing with cause, and the employee trying to get them to admit they’re just being laid off, because if the company admits during the exit interview that she’s just being laid off without cause, it’s nearly impossible to contest her unemployment benefits claim later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games that force you to make hard choices⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to go a little against the grain and recommend Fuga: Melodies of Steel and its sequel. It’s not exactly what you described, but the game is very adept on forcing extremely difficult and impactful choices on you naturally through its gameplay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It makes sense to judge how closely LLMs mimic human learning when people are using it as a defense to AI companies scraping copyrighted content, and making the claim that banning AI scraping is as nonsensical as banning human learning.

  But when it’s pointed out that LLMs don’t learn very similarly to humans, and require scraping far more material than a human does, suddenly AIs shouldn’t be judged by human standards? I don’t know if it’s intentional on your part, but that’s a pretty classic example of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. You can’t have it both ways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  For better or worse, the “FUCK YOUUUUU! FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUU!” cutscene doomed it, it was impossible to treat the game as a legitimate entity after that point