mindbleach
@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on we are creators 21 hours ago:
The Babylonians knew a * b = 1/4 * ( (a+b)^2 - (a-b)^2 ), and and used tables of 1/4 * x^2 to do multiplication by addition. It took three thousand years for Napier to discover modern logarithms. The slide rule was invented eight years later.
- Comment on Anon listens to the radio 1 day ago:
Some industries go ‘we have to do [blank] because that’s the most popular thing’ and some industries go ‘we can’t do [blank] because everyone else is doing [blank].’ Inevitably the latter get infected with executives from the former.
- Comment on Anon listens to the radio 1 day ago:
I think broadcasters are legally required to announce who’s broadcasting, at some minimum interval. I know it affects ham radio - because slow-scan image transmissions worked around it by watermarking their callsign in the image. It’d also explain why Sirius XM does it so goddamn often when every receiver already has a screen.
- Comment on adult porn is gross 3 days ago:
More directly, 18 is not the moment you take the shrink-wrap off your genitals. It’s when you get thrown to the wolves. It’s the point where you’re assumed to already know enough that all your future decisions are your own fault.
Drives me up the wall when fandoms are like ‘You can’t show that seventeen-year-old having impure thoughts about a close friend! It’s still six months until they can get facefucked on camera for money.’ If y’all can’t handle that for fictional characters, the unrefined horniness of actual pubescent humans is going to obliterate your psyche.
- Comment on A project to bring CUDA to non-Nvidia GPUs is making major progress — ZLUDA update now has two full-time developers, working on 32-bit PhysX support and LLMs, amongst other things 1 week ago:
If past is prologue, expect it to mysteriously shut down in three months, only for another very promising effort to emerge circa 2026.
- Comment on potoo 1 week ago:
This seems more like “angry dog noises.”
- Comment on The Original Flavour 1 week ago:
- Comment on 11 Bit confirm that they used generative AI for The Alters "in a very limited manner" 1 week ago:
These tools aren’t going anywhere.
Make your peace.
- Comment on Country music star to undergo surgery after onstage stroke 1 week ago:
PUT THE NAME IN THE FUCKING HEADLINE
- Comment on "Where all the communities are gone?", or a communities migration megathread 1 week ago:
“Where have all the communities gone?” is a question.
“Where all the communities have gone” is a statement.
- Comment on No thoughts, head empty 1 week ago:
- Comment on No thoughts, head empty 1 week ago:
Oh that’s why it’s called Operation Clambake.
- Comment on Anon loves The Lord of the Rings 1 week ago:
- Comment on Anon loves The Lord of the Rings 1 week ago:
Deus Ex, if you ignore that it really is ugly as sin. Sounds amazing! Plays beautifully! But yeesh, Unreal Engine 1 humans.
Most immersive sims are arguably in the same boat. The people involved had enormous ideas. As commercial products, they were woefully underappreciated, until years later. And quite frankly they do look like shit compared to much simpler contemporaries. Some NoClip documentary about Looking Glass could show an artist with muscular dystrophy
- Comment on Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books 2 weeks ago:
Most anti-AI sentiments seem like misplaced hatred of awful companies forcing nonsense on everybody, or a refusal to place judgement on capitalism itself.
- Comment on Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death after 40 years 2 weeks ago:
Guru meditation.
- Comment on making banana bread 2 weeks ago:
Calm down, Roko.
- Comment on Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books 2 weeks ago:
Meta got shit on for pirating books.
Anthropic got shit on for not pirating books.
- Comment on Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books 2 weeks ago:
Right, a 12 GB model trained on 100,000,000 images isn’t big enough to contain an MD5 checksum of each.
The same people expect it to identify the authorship of sentence fragments, but never quote one whole paragraph from any book ever. Now: gigabytes of text could be a significant fraction of all books. But finding a single recognizable page is news. Storing text is not what these companies spent a bajillion dollars on.
- Comment on Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books 2 weeks ago:
Turning books into a language model is transformative. No LLM is a substitute for the original works.
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 2 weeks ago:
To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren’t allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.
Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There’s a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.
Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what’s available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don’t even do mirrors, anymore.
There’s a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.
- Comment on Anon remembers moot 2 weeks ago:
Careful with that, it’s an antique.
- Comment on Anon remembers moot 2 weeks ago:
/b/ was never good.
rs.4chan.org was fucking awesome, though.
- Comment on Anon remembers moot 2 weeks ago:
Yeah that’s plainly worse than everything that’s happened because of this.
- Comment on The Elder God 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Reminder that you do not own digital games 2 weeks ago:
Copyright is about copying. When someone sells you a product, and you buy it, then you own it. No license is involved. Under the first sale doctrine, no license can be involved - a book can’t have an insert with a EULA. They can print it… but it doesn’t matter. You bought that slip of paper, too.
If you stubbornly believe there’s some instant contract required to look at the logo on a candy wrapper, why are you tutting at people for calling that intolerable nonsense, instead of demanding a change to that intolerable nonsense?
- Comment on Reminder that you do not own digital games 2 weeks ago:
Two crimes, then.
- Comment on Reminder that you do not own digital games 2 weeks ago:
No. I own that copy. It’s not a license to anything. I own it. It’s mine. That’s what the money was for.
Don’t play corporate word games with concepts as basic as having things.
- Comment on Reminder that you do not own digital games 2 weeks ago:
I own every book on my shelf. That copy is not the same as copyright. Grow up.
- Comment on Reminder that you do not own digital games 2 weeks ago:
Books can’t say “by buying this book, nuh uh, you secretly agreed to blah blah blah.”
That shit got thrown out a century ago. Fuck off making excuses for corporate bastards in a new medium.