Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

See the Fairphone, you might be surprised

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Yeah… Tim Sweeny hasn’t been kind to Linux like Gabe has, but Sweeny has really pushed for increasing developer margins, breaking down monopolizes, etc.

Ultimately, competition is good… even if competition does result in some discomfort from having two major PC game stores instead of one.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

This comment is on par with those that seek to reduce abortions by banning them. In both cases, you have absolute positions “no guns”, “no abortions” that ignore the fact that people have decided they need these things and are going to get them. Similarly, those positions ignore real, practical steps, that help address the underlying issues.

The smarter thing for reducing abortions would be free contraceptives.

The smarter thing for reducing gun violence (when it’s accidental) is absolutely what the other person here said, train people how to use them properly and safely.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

No, it’s not a false equivalence at all. It speaks to the failure of absolutism to get ANYTHING done.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

If you think it was about abortion or guns, you’re missing the point.

Edit: I’m a bit perturbed in general, you’re just yelling “false equivalence.” If you really want to claim “false equivalence” you first need to understand what’s actually being compared. It sure as hell isn’t abortion and gun rights. What’s being compared is how absolutisms trade incremental progress and compromise for all or nothing gambles that are the fundamental foundation of everything that’s wrong with American politics at the moment. You won’t take a x% reduction in gun related injuries and deaths by teaching people that already have them how to use them safely to prevent accidental injury because “all gun use is inherently violent” and … (edit again, I’m removing the words I put in your mouth).

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

The lemmy circle jerk is real when it comes to law enforcement and capitalism hate.

The idea is that rather than the government running prisons at a loss, private companies run the prisons, and the jobs the prisoners do make a profit for the prison’s owners. The imprisonment itself just constitutes an expense.

It kind of makes sense on paper (“well they broke the law why are we paying all this money to support their lives!??”), but it’s a bad idea in practice as it creates the wrong incentives. You end up with entities that desire more people in prisons because that’s how they grow their profit margins… and that obviously comes with some sketchy implications (e.g. lobbying for more non-violent offenders to get jail time, longer sentences, etc).

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

What do you think is going to happen to the hundreds of thousands of existing internal combustion cars? If you really need one, I’m sure there will be one on the used market that’s acceptable.

Beyond that though, a lot can and should happen in 7-12 years. The technology should advance (it already has been pretty rapidly), gas cars have had a century to advance. The goal is currently 600+ miles on a charge and potentially as low as a 10 minute charge time from what I’ve seen with the major milestones anticipated at 2026 and 2028.

These dates also aren’t set in stone… people act like we can’t just say “okay okay, we’re not ready yet, you can make more ICE cars”

Regardless of that, we’re still very much heading towards running out of gas (I have no idea why people stopped talking about that). We’re also still very much heading towards a climate crisis. We need a change, we’re not doing it for the fun of it.

It will have real benefits when it’s done with. Electric is more stable price wise, that will have a stabilizing effect across the economy. It will also prevent us from needing to have another oil war. It will also further clean up the air which will help many breathe better and reduce chronic conditions.

If car manufacturers can’t get battery electric working, the next thing will probably be a push for hydrogen, but ultimately we’ll see. Battery swappable car designs are another idea that’s been floated, and that’s not a bad idea really (it flat out removes the concern of battery packs going bad because you just go to the “gas station” and get a different pack).

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

You mean we won’t have to buy ewaste electronics to play Mario Kart? Sign me up.

Realistically though, I’d bet on a “Mario Kart Mushroom Kingdom Racing” release (or something) that would just be a cross platform live service.

… and honestly I’ll take that any day over Nintendo, which I’ve given $0 in over a decade because I refuse to buy their ewaste. I would love to have their games on PC though.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

PC parts can be reused and resold until they’re irrelevant. Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).

Meanwhile, consoles do one job only, play games. If something breaks, more often than not you get an entirely new console; maybe the manufacturer actually fixes your old one (if they’re still working on it).

They also lose security updates and become opportunities for botnets to infect and exploit. No device should be used past its end of software life that’s connected to the Internet. Regardless of that, many people do continue to use old consoles and smart phones that are long past their socially responsible expiration date.

Beyond that, if someone has a computer capable of playing a game, to force them to buy a different piece of hardware is by definition unnecessary ewaste.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Window’s compatibility layer is still far beyond what a console provides. Beyond that, WINE (for Linux) is increasingly able to run Windows programs from many decades… In a sense, Linux is becoming the best Windows compatibility layer for old software and games in the world.

You don’t need to reach 100% to provide value/be better.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Christ. They’re aimed at solving the problem of hardware that falls out of software support long before the hardware fails AND phones that need entirely replaced instead of being repaired.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I mean, they already did it… so… thanks? 🤷‍♂️

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I just watched it … it’s mind boggling that could be interpreted as anything but a dig.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Jagex is respectful not the company I’d look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by “removing the feature” then “adding” the same feature with a different coat of paint.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

The Squeal of Fortune, replaced by Treasure Hunter.

But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best.

I really don’t know about that. They seem to do it so regularly that it’s been a borderline abusive relationship over the years. Back when the Gowers ran the company, things operated much more smoothly and particularly the pay-to-win aspects were completely absent.

There’s no other game I know of with a subscription, pay-to-win loot boxes, cosmetics store, season pass, and bonds. There’s also no other game I’m aware of that has overhauled its combat system to such controversy that it split the game in half (and seemingly most people play the old version) – the closest being Minecraft. There’s also absolutely no game where the developers regularly say “that’s engine work so we can’t do it”, when they own their own engine.

I still like RuneScape, but at this point I’ve completely given up on PvP in the game and anything resembling fairness. I just expect Jagex to do everything they can to try and entice me to give them more and more money for … ultimately … less.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep.

Agreed.

The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.

Yeah, I think the right thing to do would’ve been to make the wilderness a safe PvP faction vs faction area that’s basically a continuous version of one of those events.

I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.

Any code base can be fixed, it’s just a function of time and money. They can yell spaghetti code all they want, but ultimately Jagex is the one that allowed that to happen in the first place. It’s not an excuse to further gaslight your customers. It’s something you should take accountability on, and work to fix. Done right, having your own engine is an opportunity to do new and exciting things.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

It’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.

They might be doing exactly that FWIW. There’s some evidence Jagex is working on a “RuneScape universe” oriented game in Unreal Engine.

Still, that’s not the silver bullet that people often think it is. Rewrites are often far more expensive than originally anticipated and extremely risky as even if you intend to make the exact same game, there are often differences that come down to the underlying engine in how the game plays that can be controversial.

For context, I’ve been on a team that did a full rewrite of a large complicated C# web application in Ruby and I’ve also worked on several C/C++ “desktop” applications that have roots in the late 80s and early 90s. The former is more “fun” in a sense, you can make up for a lot of sins. However, I fundamentally believe that unless the language you’re moving from has serious fundamental issues (e.g. you’re insane and wrote a million line application in Bash), you’re probably better taking a hard look at your application and retrofitting new systems inside of the old application where you most badly need those changes.

Even in the “worst case” it’s in practice true that most of the code doesn’t need touched, it’s just some really intertwined portions that need revamped. You can often get away with making a new system that replaces the guts of the old, thus powering both the existing code, and allowing you to achieve whatever goal you had in rewriting in the first place (working faster, safer, more readably, etc).

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I just am cynical about Jagex’s willingness to spend money in this space. Ever since they’ve been owned by venture capital, everything is penny pinched; it needs to have an obvious return on investment.

We as players normally only see the content developers in interviews, and they’re often folks that don’t even have proper computer science degrees or training. Jagex internally for years has hired largely unskilled workers into their QA department and then promoted them into “developer” positions that work with RuneScript.

I’m fairly confident the engine team was a skeleton crew (and one split among developing iOS, Android, and Desktop clients) until the last few years when it became apparent at least some investment into the engine on the server side/more broadly was necessary.

I looked into joining their engine team at one point, and then promptly walked away when I saw the payscale.

Basically, I see no reason to give them slack; it’s actually a bit counter productive in my view. The community should be stern that Jagex should address their issues rather than running from them and constantly blaming “yesterday’s Jagex” for why “today’s Jagex” is making bad decisions, can’t do XYZ, etc

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I also just wanted to add; if you want to look at what this looks like when the game development company is functioning properly look at Crytek and Hunt Showdown.

Crytek has publicly stated Hunt has a lot of issues internally in its code base. They then responded by committing to fix those issues (i.e. fix their spaghetti), and then they followed up by actually fixing issues (off the top of my head, an advantage when peeking from the left down to how the game handled the player camera was fixed, bugs in the ammo system resulting in a number of issues with reloading were fixed).

They didn’t stop there though. They said in their last roadmap update, they’re working with their internal CryEngine development team to make major changes to CryEngine (and this is reflected by Crytek’s CryEngine team stopping release of CryEngine to make major refactors for CryEngine 7) to do everything they want to do, remove hacks coded into Hunt’s fork of CryEngine, and pay all the tech debt down to get Hunt running on the most recent CryEngine (and hopefully keep it there, with all the tech advances that brings).

There was and has been consistent follow through.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

In those Reddit threads almost everyone seemed like they had second hand information or it was just a meme that was constantly repeated.

Literally every conversation about Stadia

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Basically just memeing to death how bad is was… it actually had valve like store policies, really good latency compared to other cloud options (even now) to the point it felt local even on a shooter, false information that you had to pay a subscription to play your purchased games, etc

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Yes, but also not every issue is that.

Granted, I think center vs left is where meaningful policy conversation is happening… left vs right or center vs right is normally just painful

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

When I wrote that I was internally mapping center to mainstream Democrats.

I think you’re putting that more at like Joe Manchin.

Still… in either case I think you’re out of your mind if you think anyone, except for the very furthest right white nationals, is willing to overlook slavery itself in 2023.

The comparison of “Center” as an abstract thing you’re tying to Hitler honestly comes off as unhinged.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Because God forbid we try and understand?

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I knew a guy, generally a good guy, and he helped me out when I was young.

Anyways, he made some bad choices (namely cheating on his fiance with his childhood bestie), knocked said girl up, they got married… they had another kid… a few years later this relationship turned sour, and I was rarely hearing from him. I later learned he was living out of his car at times.

At one point during this mess he told me his soon to be ex wife invited him over one night, they slept together, then he woke up with the cops in his face and her accusing him of raping her last night.

I didn’t know what to think of it at the time, and I still don’t. The person I thought I knew never would’ve cheated on his fiance… surely he wouldn’t have raped someone.

Unlike this story, the charges for the guy I know were dropped and he wasn’t prosecuted, let alone convicted. Maybe it was just a ploy for a better outcome in the divorce? That seems to be the conclusion the police drew. If it had gone to trial and he’d been convicted… I probably wouldn’t have written a similar letter? But also maybe it would’ve been in some ways good for the judge to see not just this person at their worst moments but at better moments? What if the evidence wasn’t strong? What if I hadn’t followed the case closely?

I haven’t heard from this guy in years at this point, hence why I’m avoiding the word friend. However at one point, he was a friend … and I don’t find it so easy to reconcile the “person you know” with the “person you’ve been told you know”

I think it’s more about that difficulty reconciling, than “he never raped me.” If they weren’t lying in their letters as well… maybe this should just be considered part of the process? Like, yes Masterson committed the crime, now who else was he? Did he contribute nothing to society except for being a vicious Hollywood predator? etc.

The scientology thing adds a whole other angle here…

Anyways, the point is it’s easy to not understand why someone would do something, but that doesn’t mean it’s not understandable (it doesn’t mean it’s justified either).

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

makes me wonder if he’s doing it to throw people off the scent, considering he bedded a 14 year old

Wait what??

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Ashton’s first wife was 15 years older than him? And when he married Mila she would’ve been 32.

I guess they did meet on set when Mila was 14 but like she didn’t start dating him until she was in her late twenties and it looks like she was dating Macaulay Culkin before then.

I have no dog in this fight really… I don’t have any particular feelings for Ashton; but that doesn’t really hit me as the moves of a predator. By her late twenties Mila surely was old enough to make her own choices, no? And she was clearly with someone else for a long time, no?

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Yeah… Stadia was actually good. I wish they’d just come out and make a promise that if they shut the service down in the next 10 years they’d refund everyone’s purchases.

That’s what they ended up doing anyways, but having a guarantee might have gotten it to the critical mass that it needed.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Did valve ever release it?

Crytek is doing some major work to CryEngine for Hunt Showdown.

O3DE also exists

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I meant publicly (so other devs could use it). Sounds like no :)

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Or CryEngine

Or Godot

Or O3DE (a CryEngine fork … that’s from what I understand heavily diverged)

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I like inoreader, but I don’t think it’s even open source, let alone FOSS?

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I’m all for Godot getting better; that said, has Epic, Open3D, or Crytek made similar moves?

(I know Crytek isn’t much of a player currently, but as someone who’s been following them closer in recent years, it really seems like they got their house back in order)

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I think it’s just a “I said the wrong word” thing.

Now if he starts recanting about the time he met Elvis on the moon, then I’ll be concerned.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I’m going to punch some holes in that… the fact check is making the assumption that Negri was still working as a conductor. That’s not what Biden said. He said he was a “senior guy at [possibly should’ve been or in the way some folks speak, on] Amtrack.”

Not concerned about whether he recalls it as 2012-2013 or “in this one case” 2015.

Not concerned that his mother would’ve already been dead, the story about how he was riding to see her under my interpretation is not related to the event with Ang.

deceased by the time Biden logged 1.2 million miles on Air Force Two.

It’s plausible that Biden logged 1.2 million train miles as vice president by early 2016, based on accounts around the time by Biden and David Lienemann, the vice president’s official photographer.

I’m generally all for AP but this is a mess. It also ignores the calculation being slightly wrong/made with different assumptions by the train drivers/Joe misremembering or misstating the exact calculation.

This is an exceptionally weak fact check that seems to interpret what Biden was saying in a very specific way and then asserts there’s no way that specific interpretation happened… rather than questioning the interpretation and elements of the situation.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

This would’ve been after already getting beaten up over inaccuracies.

I think he probably just didn’t care. As the other guy said, the exact details of the story weren’t his priority. I’m 28, even I as a younger man have variations in my stories when I tell them, especially off the cuff…

and Biden has a reputation for going off script. See the old “scandal” where he as VP tells Obama “this is a big fucking deal” as the mic accidentally catches him.

This seems like one of those “off script” moments. I mean do you really think he couldn’t get this story down with precision if he cared? And if he or his writers are so worried about it, do you really think they’d leave it in the script over and over again?

He’s old, I’ll give you that, but come on. The machine that wants to paint this guy as incompetent is relentless.

He’s fine, a half hour with no script in hand, no prompter, etc last Monday youtu.be/ybC9TfYRxP8

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

The tech is not to that spec. Yet.

I’m not sure it will. At least, not this tech, not this approach to the problem. From my understanding there’s fundamentally no comprehension; it’s not bugged, broken, or incomplete, it’s just not there… it’s missing from the design.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I don’t believe in scaling as a way to discover understanding. Doing that is just praying that the machine comes alive… these machines weren’t programmed to come alive in that way. That’s my fundamental argument, the design of LLMs ignores understanding of the content… it doesn’t matter how much content it’s been scaled up to.

If I teach a real AI about fishing, it should be able to reason about fishing and it shouldn’t need to have read a supplementary knowledge of mankind to do it.

What the LLMs seem to be moving towards is more of a search and summary engine (for existing content). That’s a very similar and potentially quite useful thing, but it’s not the same thing as understanding.

It’s the difference between the kid that doesn’t know much but is really good at figuring it out based on what they know vs the kid that’s read all the text books front to back and can’t come up with anything original to save their life but can quickly regurgitate and summarize anything they’ve ever read.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Furthermore, LLM’s have been shown to do many things that aren’t in their training data, so the notion that it’s a stochastic parrot is also false.

And (from what I’ve seen) they get things wrong with extreme regularity, increasingly so as thing diverge from the training data. I wouldn’t say they’re a “stochastic parrot” but they don’t seem to be much better when things need to be correct… and again, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of their design, I don’t anticipate this technology (at least without some kind of augmented approach that can reason about the substance) overcoming that.

In order for you to learn about fishing, you had to learn a shitload about the world. Babies don’t come out of the womb able to do such tasks, there is a shitload of prerequisite knowledge in order to fish, it’s unfair to expect an ai to do this without prerequisite knowledge.

That’s missing the forest for the trees. Of course an AI isn’t going to go fishing. However, I should be able to assert some facts about fishing and it should be able to reason based on those assertions. e.g. a child can work off of facts presented about fishing, “fish are hard to catch in muddy water” -> “the water is muddy, does that impact my chances of a catching a bluegill?” -> “yes, it does, bluegill are fish, and fish don’t like muddy water”.

There are also “teachings” brought about by how these are programmed that make the flaws less obvious, e.g., if I try to repeat the experiment in the post here Google’s Bard outright refuses to continue because it doesn’t have information about Ryan McGee. I’ve also seen Bard get notably better as it’s been scaled up, early on I tried asking it about RuneScape and it spewed absolute nonsense. Now… It’s reasonable-ish.

I was able to reproduce a nonsense response (once again) by asking about RuneScape. I asked how to get 99 firemaking, and it invented a mechanic that doesn’t exist “Using a bonfire in the Charred Stump: The Charred Stump is a bonfire located in the Wilderness. It gives 150% Firemaking experience, but it is also dangerous because you can be attacked by other players.” This is a novel (if not creative) invention of Bard likely derived from advice for training Prayer (which does have something in the Wilderness which gives 350% experience).

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Parents are a funny one… At a point I really don’t think you have control of your kid… they become their own person and their friends play a major influence in their life.

If they have good friends that are better than the parents that can be a good thing.

If they have bad friends that are worse than the parents, well that’s a bad thing.

You can say “well they never should’ve let them associate with those friends!” but I’m immediately suspicious of easy answers, and that’s as easy of an answer as they come.

I think a lot of us saw this in our teen years if we’re being honest. We typically tell ourselves stories that make only the good things cases of “self development” (oh that kid is so much better than his parents) but I’m sure it happens the other way. I don’t think all evil people can be blamed on evil (or even bad) parents (which is terrifying if you think about it).

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

They could also change the rules with a simple majority and do what needs done, but that’s going to be a last resort desperate measure.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Horseshoe theory?

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

I agree, everything doesn’t need to be done by a super majority

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

A foreign actor’s speach isn’t constitutionally protected; that’s the relevance.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

My eyes only got 66% of the update.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

Your comment about your brother reminds me that in kindergarten I thought that the line order (alphabetical) had something to do with status. My last name starts with C so I was pretty close to the front, but I had a friend with an A for a last name, so I really wanted to move up.

I told no one of this of course until long after I’d grasped how alphabetical ordering worked myself.

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

github.com/bumble-tech/private-detector

Dark_Arc , 10 months ago

They might have behind the scenes