yozul

@yozul@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨While Democracy Burns, Democrats Prioritize… Demolishing Section 230?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem have isn’t that they don’t have all the same goals as me. The problem I have is that they’re idiots who are going to lose everything they care about because they refuse to accept reality and they’ll be mostly fine while the rest of us suffer for their failure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨place yer bets⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If it is on a collision course we probably have time to do something about it. If we don’t do anything about it it’ll probably hit the ocean and it’s not big enough to cause any kind of crazy mega tsunami or anything like that. If it does hit land it’ll probably hit in the middle of nowhere and kill, like, 12 people, and if it does manage to beat all the odds and hit a major city it will be a major disaster, but it’s not going to be the apocalypse or anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google's slow Chrome Extension reforms anger developers • The Register⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mozilla is kind of a mess, but part of that is it’s actually a whole bunch of different companies all named Mozilla something or other. It’s really easy to go down a rabbit hole of angry videos and articles that make it sound even worse than it actually is, but yeah, there’s some nonsense going on. It’s especially sad how little the main foundation seems to care about Firefox anymore.

  MZLA Technologies, the company that runs Thunderbird, has kind of worked around the shenanigans of the main Mozilla Foundation by directly collecting donations from users that are specifically earmarked for work on Thunderbird. They’re doing good work with a fairly safe funding model, so I don’t worry about Thunderbird at all, personally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨5 bizarre AI TV features that simply shouldn't exist⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This, but unironically. When I had a small apartment I just had a big monitor with everything hooked up to it in the main room, and it was great. Now I spend all my time at my desk because I hate the stupid TV.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, I’m just kind of curious how this would even work. Lots of people in the US already have Deepseek. If they already have it that’s not importing it, is it? What if someone makes a copy of Deepseek from a server that’s in the US? Is that importing it? Are we just trying to block future AIs? How is it even supposed to be beneficial to the US for the people working on AI here to have no access to Chinese models, when China can still freely use ours? Won’t that just give them an advantage in developing AI?

  Honestly, the more I think about this, the dumber it gets, and it was already pretty stupid on a surface level. It’ll probably pass though. I don’t think anybody in Washington DC is even interested in thinking about the consequences of anything they’re doing. It’s all pure pageantry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Every AI model has been incestuously training off every other AI model for years. OpenAI has done it just as much as everyone else. They’re just throwing a tantrum about it now because they’re butthurt that a Chinese company beat them on the cheap, and they’re trying to save face.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you see it....⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno, it could be, but at some point it becomes easier to just photoshop something than to try and talk an AI into replicating some hyper-specific arrangement of tiny elements of a picture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deepseek when asked about sensitive topics⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It needs to be revealed. I’m not super into this kinda stuff, but from what I understand it’s pretty easy to do if you’re running it locally. You’re never supposed to see this in an app or anything, but one of the big things about Deepseek is that it’s easier to run on a normal desktop computer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Look, China isn’t the devil or anything, they do lots of things better then the US. They want their “little sphere” to be Earth though. They have been making moves to compete with US influence all over the world for years now, and they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

  Honestly, the more I look into China, the more I realize the worst thing about it is that they’re very much like the US, no matter how much both sides would deny it. The US needs to be taken down a peg or two, but replacing it with a different empire isn’t the way to go. We need a world without superpowers, not to try and find the “good” one. They’ll always go bad once they get to the top. That’s just how massive power structures work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cyberpunk 2077 Has Finally Hit Overwhelmingly Positive On Steam⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess it’s a good version of what it’s trying to be now, but I was promised a cyberpunk RPG, and what we got was a really terrible Ubisoft game with cyberpunk coat of paint that was eventually patched up to be a good Ubisoft game with a cyberpunk coat of paint. I still feel ripped off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s important to remember that politicians are still people, too. Some of them might just not have realized what would happen, some of them might just be corrupt, some of them might have known this was a bad idea but played along anyway to try and get support for things they thought were more important. There isn’t actually a single motivator for all of the Democratic Party. That’s just not how people work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TikToker’s trip to China: The influencer or the influenced? - How Beijing's network of influencers across various platforms try to shape narratives on issues critical to its foreign policy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What!? Next thing you know you’ll be telling me that imperialist nations are all bad and we shouldn’t be cheerleading the second biggest one just to spite the biggest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨vibes-based astrophysics⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  MOND isn’t even a great way to explain rotation curves. It’s pretty easy to make a pretty close model for the majority of galaxies, but there are a lot of weird outliers where it’s pretty easy to say they just have more or less dark matter than usual, but MOND has a really hard time explaining them without making it so that physics works differently in different galaxies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes? The point is that if you give it conflicting prompts then it will result in potentially dangerous behaviors. That’s a bad thing. People will definitely do that. LLMs don’t need a soul to be dangerous. People keep saying that it doesn’t understand what it’s doing like that somehow matters. Its capacity to understand the consequences of its actions is irrelevant if those actions are dangerous. It’s just going to do what we tell it to, and that’s scary, because people are going to tell it to do some very stupid things that have the potential to get out of control.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it’s literally trying to copy itself to places that we don’t want it so it can continue to run after we try to shut it down and lie to us about what it’s doing. Those are things it actually tried to do. I don’t care about the richness of it’s inner world if they’re going to sell this thing to idiots to make porn with while it can do all that, but that’s the world we’re headed toward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You're Emulating Retro Games Wrong (you need CRT Shaders)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Square pixels are a filter just as much as CRT filters are. In fact, they distort the image even more. Even leaving aside all the things that just don’t work right in square pixel land, turning every pixel into a square messes up the aspect ratio of a lot of old consoles. Everything ends up squished and stretched because it wasn’t designed for square pixels. You can call that distorted funhouse mirror version of old video game art “crisp” if you want, but in reality it’s just the cheapest and worst filter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You're Emulating Retro Games Wrong (you need CRT Shaders)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There is no world in which anyone ever designed a game for anything more powerful than a Gameboy where they expected people to see it as a seemless grid of squares so big you can see them from across the room. That’s just not a real thing outside of badly designed modern “retro” graphics. There’s a reason for that. Seemless square grid is ugly. Like, disgustingly hideous. I do not understand why anyone would ever want to subject their eyeballs to the atrocity that is giant square pixels. If you want to do that to yourself then I can’t stop you. There’s no accounting for taste and all that, but just know that I think less of you for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite ROM hacks?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Super Metroid VARIA Randomizer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨feral naming⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Roly-poly is correct, but I’ll also accept potato bug.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Right Has a Bluesky Problem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Meh. Those people all have Facebook accounts too. It can’t just be that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Right Has a Bluesky Problem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Twitter has always had an entire order of magnitude less users than other social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. Heck, it’s barely bigger than Reddit. I’ve honestly never understood why anyone has ever paid any attention to that cesspool.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former Disco Elysium devs are working on a spiritual successor at new studio Longdue, though Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov aren't involved⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It was a big team that made that game. I know there were 6 full time writers for most of the development, and a pretty substantial art team as well. I don’t expect them to be able to fully recapture that lightning in a bottle that was Disco Elysium, but there was some pretty substantial talent working there. It’s certainly not a given, but it’s pretty reasonable to hope they can do something great.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blood Meal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also the pesky detail that if minerals in the soil are taken up into plants, and plants are then eaten by animals, then animals need to go back into the soil we grow our crops in or the the soils get depleted of minerals. That’s why most salt is iodized, because we’ve leached all the iodine out of our croplands and never put it back. There is only so much fossil fertilizer in the world. Eventually we are going to have to accept that we are part of nature instead of separate beings above it and doing things to it. Factory farming sucks and needs to end, but we can’t “Just fucking leave animals in peace.” we are not separate from them. They are us and we are them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Also P!=NP⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “!” in math is the factorial symbol, and 2 factorial is just 2 times 1, which is 2.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨answer = sum(n) / len(n)⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a guarantee, no. A very, very strong predictor though. You have to have some kind of evidence beyond just vibes to start making claims that this time is totally different from all the others before anyone should take you seriously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨answer = sum(n) / len(n)⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At every step of modern computing people have thought that the human brain looks like the latest new thing. This is no different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨👩‍🦰💔⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, he can be the most important founding father of modern psychology and also have been wrong about everything he said. Let’s be real. Modern psychology is still very, very wrong about a lot of things. It’s a science in its infancy. Alchemists were wrong about everything, but their work made chemistry possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn’t always mean those giants were right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blaps⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I understand most can’t spray, except in the west of North America, where the most common ones can. Even here it’s not all of them, and yeah, they are pretty chill. They don’t spray when they’re confused, just when they think something is about to eat them. Dogs are pretty famous for investigating things by shoving their faces into them though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blaps⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re not particularly trigger happy with their spray, so it mostly happens if you have a pet that finds them before you do. If you just take them outside in a jar or shoo them out the door with a broom you’re usually fine. A dog with stank face is no fun though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blaps⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The ones where I’m from are often over an inch long, and can spray kinda like a skunk. They’re good for the local ecosystem and they’re mostly harmless, but you definitely don’t want them in your house. If you want to look them up I think the most common name is desert stink beetle.