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DaDragon

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DaDragon ,

Honest question: what do we expect the Pope to say? For all intents and purposes, he is the head of a very old and established ‘religion’. He wouldn’t be the pope if his views were contrary to the teachings of the church as it currently exists.

DaDragon ,

I wouldn’t expect an extremely old person to be aware of all the nuances of modern language. Least of all the pope, who, I’d assume, has effectively zero contact with anyone even remotely close to being a rainbow activist. External culture and langue has moved a lot in the last 15-20 years. While I am far from that old, it’s not unreasonable to expect that calling someone that was relatively normal during the popes childhood, certainly in a religious environment.

DaDragon ,

And maybe that was the point of that mission. To cause you to think about the violence that you normally included upon your virtual enemies without a second thought. If you play a FPS game, you won’t question why you’re shooting the other team, you just do it. The same way it doesn’t technically matter why the crowd of people in said COD level are your enemies. What matters is the developer telling you to shoot them.

DaDragon ,

Not from the point of view of most Republicans. You can make the claim that abortion pills ‘kill’ 100% of people in a pregnant person. If abortion is murder, then abortion pills must be placed on a similar level to rat poison or cyanide. Ironically, neither is actually a controlled substance…

DaDragon ,

There’s nothing technically stopping you from building an android smartphone just the way you like. In fact, there’s extreme modding folks that do things like already. What we really lack is a future-proofed connector standard for component connectivity that just works.

Biden: what would Trump have done if the Capitol riots had been led by Black Americans? (www.theguardian.com)

Joe Biden has launched one of his most scathing attacks yet on Donald Trump’s record of racism, suggesting that the former US president would have acted differently to the January 6 2021 insurrection if was led by Black people....

DaDragon ,

We’re going back to the og crowd control options, I see. If you haven’t seen the relevant forgotten weapons video, Thompson and other manufacturers used to produce birdshot shells for crowd control. Generally intended for indirect applications, but there’s nothing inherently present that would prevent you from directly firing at protestors.

DaDragon ,

It’s almost universally the one constant that can be relied on under any circumstance

What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say?

I have many conversations with people about Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The idea that “it makes convincing sentences, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about” is a difficult concept to convey or wrap your head around. Because the sentences are so convincing....

DaDragon ,

The short hand answer I’d try to give people is ‘it’s statistics’. Based on training data, there’s a certain chance of certain words being in proximity of each other. There’s no reasoning behind placement, other than whatever pattern is discernible from known situation.

DaDragon ,

Sounds like Musk’s taking a page out of the Russian/Ukrainian oligarch book: there’s no point in paying bills ahead of time, if you can make even more money by ignoring the bill for a couple of months

DaDragon ,

Israel is currently the US’ closest ‘ally’ in the Middle East. Not that Israel wouldn’t turn on the US in a heartbeat, but the US needs Israel to maintain force in the region. Add to that, Israel is Jewish. In light of events almost 100 years ago, it’s a bit problematic to criticise anything a group of Jewish people do.

The US can’t exactly come out and say anything that would be too disruptive to their relationship with Israel.

DaDragon ,

Because some people enjoy milk with their food? (I know it’s not the answer you’re going for)

DaDragon ,

Shudder. Not sure I could drink that, honestly

DaDragon ,

What? do you really think that that Netanyahu is some sort of saint with his response to the October 7 attacks? It was a political choice to let things happen to the point they did.

And if you’re on Hamas’ side in all of this, do you really think that nobody targeted by them was innocent?

DaDragon ,

Which empire?

In short, are are you trying to say that Hamas killed no innocents on October 7?

DaDragon ,

Isn’t Kai Shek one of the most important founders of Taiwan? Sure, he had his issues (for example, ordering the deaths of a couple folks now and again), but you cannot have modern Taiwan without him. Just like how Mao is an integral part of the shape the modern PRC took.

DaDragon ,

Pepper, salt, chilli. You can also use stock cubes as spices.
In general, I’d ask what sorts of flavours you like.

DaDragon ,

Although with things like spices, there’s no point in measuring them anyway. Spices are almost always added to taste, so it’s easier to think in terms of ‘x hand movements with the container’.

And yes, I have actually weighed 8oz of water. Well, not specifically 8oz, but I’ve certainly weighed out water to +- a couple grams for a recipe. If a recipe is specific about contents, why would I not measure it out?

DaDragon ,

I’ll nitpick that said definition is also arbitrary. Why is it 1l of water at sea level, and not molecular weight of the water? And why a Liter anyway.

Even metric units like time are somewhat arbitrary. Why is a second based on caesium frequency, and not some other element?

DaDragon ,

Heh, looks like the old folks are trying to keep their theories illogical!
I have to say I don’t personally think much of current gender reassignment, but it makes absolutely no sense to say that this current trend isn’t in some way aligned with ‘the lord’s plan’, should you believe in that. There are definitely people who feel better as the other sex, you’re trying to tell everyone that an all-knowing being couldn’t account for that?

DaDragon ,

Maybe reach out to the smaller artists, then? I’m sure most of them aren’t opposed to sending you a file if you pay

DaDragon ,

Probably should be mentioned too that there’s the very clever idea of simply repurposing existing coal power plants to run nuclear fuel. The main ‘expense’ of nuclear power plants, as I understand, is the general equipment itself, not the nuclear core. Those can be built much quicker than building an entire plant from scratch.

Star Citizen's first-person shooting is getting backpack-reloading, dynamic crosshairs, procedural recoil, and other improvements to 'bring the FPS combat to AAA standard' (www.pcgamer.com)

Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!

DaDragon ,

Maybe because development has a high ongoing cost that they do not have any other product to take up? Star citizen has a fairly large scope, and the fact that they have even gotten to the point where a fairly high number of gameplay loops are fully integrated is quite impressive. If you look at their ship designs, for example, you can see just how much care was put into a lot of the designs (see the architectural reviews, for example)

DaDragon ,

Lawsuits for what? They never promised any customer that they would immediately deliver a working end product. As far as I can make out, they offer early access to an in-development product, with your purchase going toward funding development. It’s more akin to a donation with strings (access to the product).

DaDragon ,

I’ve literally never paid for Star Citizen. Not sure how I’m supposed to be a sweaty fanboy…

It’s a large scoped game, and from what I’ve seen, they’ve slowly been turning it into an incredibly feature-filled game that goes beyond the scope of what most other games deliver.

DaDragon ,

Shush. Welcome our AI overlords!

Chief enforcer of US gun laws fears Americans may become numb to violence with each mass shooting (apnews.com)

The head of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says he fears that a drumbeat of mass shootings and other gun violence across the United States could make Americans numb to the bloodshed, fostering apathy to finding solutions rather than galvanizing communities to act....

DaDragon ,

To be fair to those legislators, that amendment is fairly clear with its ‘shall not be infringed’ statement. The only way out of that issue is to pass a new amendment invalidating the old one.

DaDragon ,

Less a necessarily bad person, and more an ideologically influenced one, I’d wager. Sure, there’s probably a couple psychopaths mixed in too

DaDragon ,

Fair, but that argument stops working when it’s a large portion of a society. Our understandings of right and wrong are somewhat a social construct, and so subject to social change. All it really requires is a variation of ‘us v them’ mentality for most people to accept it as fact.

DaDragon ,

It’s the same way I can’t completely blame Hamas fighters for everything they did on them being bad people, either.

It’s a way of acknowledging that the difference between me/you and them is not their actions themselves, but primarily their targets.

It’s why simply removing the ‘problematic’ individuals on either side can’t fix anything, and we should keep that in mind lest nothing can change.

DaDragon ,

Well, his role as a symbol is more likely to resonate with people than ‘random fuck dead, more at 11’. From what I understand, most semi-intelligent people in Russia know how fucked it is anyway, it probably helps to appeal to that.

DaDragon ,

New investors were covering existing loans you mean!
No Ponzi scheme here, nothing of the sort. Just good old economics!

But yes, they sold apartments and used the proceeds to finance existing, already sold buildings that weren’t built yet.

More Police Are Using Your Cameras for Video Evidence (www.themarshallproject.org)

Private security footage is nothing new to criminal investigations, but two factors are rapidly changing the landscape: huge growth in the number of devices with cameras, and the fact that footage usually lands in a cloud server, rather than on a tape....

DaDragon ,

Sadly there’s little option for some stuff. Robot vacuums have become super useful, even if they are arguably the biggest security risk that exists. And that will never change, no matter how capable the products get

DaDragon ,

The link doesn’t work, but I just found out it’s actually supported on mine! Although I probably won’t mess with it, since I’m not alone here

DaDragon ,

Which is pretty close to what they are! Although iirc biscuits are somewhat more crumbly

DaDragon ,

That’s what humans do, though. Maybe not probability directly, but we all know that some words should be put in a certain order. We still operate within standard norms that apply to aparte group of people. LLM’s just go about it in a different way, but they achieve the same general result. If I’m drawing a human, that means there’s a ‘hand’ here, and a ‘head’ there. ‘Head’ is a weird combination of pixels that mostly look like this, ‘hand’ looks kinda like that. All depends on how the model is structured, but tell me that’s not very similar to a simplified version of how humans operate.

DaDragon ,

So why is so much information (data) freely available on the internet? How do you expect a human artist to learn drawing, if not looking at tutorials and improving their skills through emulating what they see?

DaDragon ,

And that’s the reason why LLM generated content isn’t considered creative.

I do believe that the person using the device has a right to copyright the unique method they used to generate the content, but the content itself isn’t anything worth protecting.

DaDragon ,

Wouldn’t that lead to the same argument as originally brought against photography, though?

A photographer is effectively negotiating with the sun, the sky and everything else to hopefully get the result they are looking for on their device.

DaDragon ,

That’s a political win situation, regardless. What’s 10 million lives if you can claim that you successfully did the work that even the great leader Mao couldn’t achieve 50 years before?

DaDragon ,

I hate the fact that you’re probably right about that reason.

DaDragon ,

Which is precisely something anyone outside the US (or other countries without a functional social healthcare system) don’t understand. Nobody outside those places is as worried about their healthcare costs dragging them into debt. Which makes sense, considering there’s no reason why an ambulance should cost between 5 and 10 thousand dollars, or a drug having to cost 5000 times the production price, when it’s initial development was funded by US taxpayers.

DaDragon ,

It’s also cheap. Shitty suicide drones can be made for less than 1000$, why bother wasting expensive materials that don’t improve success rates?

DaDragon ,

Why would you want to defederate at all? It’s akin to hiding your head in the sand, except done on a community-wide scale. Just because you can’t see the nazi over there in the bushes doesn’t mean he isn’t squatting there, observing you.

Why would I want to use the multi-desktop functionality in Windows 11?

In Windows 11 there’s a button on the taskbar next to the start button that lets you switch between multiple desktop environments. It seems like something that would probably be useful in theory, but I can’t think of any reason why I would want to use it. Is it actually useful? What do people use it for?

DaDragon ,

Or you’d be buried by 300 layers of very similar open apps with different info loaded in each instance

DaDragon ,

Just as there’s apparently still thousands of new-in-box lend-lease M1928 submachine-guns in storage. I’d wager a lot of large countries have similar stockpiles, especially places like Russia that can absolutely afford to just dump shit in random places.

DaDragon ,

The M2 is slightly different in that it’s been actively kept in service (like the mg3 or the m3 Carl Gustav), which the Maxim hasn’t been (that I know of). Plenty of other old weapon systems have been, though.

DaDragon ,

To some extent, it actually does go over well, sadly.

DaDragon ,

They actually introduced pretty much that exact thing back in 2008, the Order of Parental Glory. Have more children to fuel the machine, please

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