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Hazzard

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Hazzard ,

For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.

As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.

Hazzard ,

Yeah, my first thought as well was that “pulling up” would be pulling the steering wheel back, which wouldn’t do anything. Certainly wouldn’t swerve the car all the way off the road, you wouldn’t want to jerk a plane left or right in that scenario either.

So… definitely made up. But still an amusing greentext.

Hazzard ,

I don’t necessarily disagree that we may figure out AGI, and even that LLM research may help us get there, but frankly, I don’t think an LLM will actually be any part of an AGI system.

Because fundamentally it doesn’t understand the words it’s writing. The more I play with and learn about it, the more it feels like a glorified autocomplete/autocorrect. I suspect issues like hallucination and “Waluigis” or “jailbreaks” are fundamental issues for a language model trying to complete a story, compared to an actual intelligence with a purpose.

Hazzard ,

Same honestly. And if I ever ask a question that someone might think is a duplicate, I link to that question and say something like “I found X, but the answers here don’t reflect Y”.

Hazzard ,

Eh, that’s a mixed bag. Absolutely, one could setup shared delete requests, to federate a delete request, but it would be a bit of a lie as anyone could simply… update their instance to simply ignore delete requests.

For now, simply not having a delete feature is a more honest to the realities of the fediverse. There’ll never be a “true” delete, even if they do eventually support one that’s “good enough”.

Hazzard ,

I’d be very surprised if anything functional actually comes out of this. Far more likely they get scammed out of the money by garbage like the current “AI writing detection” methods, with terrible success rates that cause more societal problems than they solve.

Hazzard ,

Ah, well that niceness was much shorter lived than expected. Oh well, my VPN will continue to block the ads anyway.

What games can you not get into because they feel too outdated?

Are there games that you tried but just couldn’t get into because they feel outdated? Games that, in theory, you would enjoy, but don’t because the controls, graphics, writing, or mechanics just don’t feel good anymore. Games that, compared to today, just don’t hold up to your standards....

Hazzard ,

My two are Morrowind, where I loved the quest design and lack of handholding, but the random hit chance and BS difficulty distribution were just… too much to handle.

And also, KOTOR, which I expected to love as a huge Star Wars fan, but the “stand around while dice are rolled” combat was just… exceptionally boring and tedious.

Hazzard ,

Surprisingly legible, but feels like I can only read it with momentum, flitting past it and letting my subconscious tell me where the word breaks are. The moment I get confused and look more closely, it becomes almost impossible to read.

Hazzard ,

So true, I have to do this with some predatory mobile game or another every year or two. Sometimes one of them just gets you.

Hazzard ,

Surprisingly, a lot of the creepy media is fairly accurate, though extreme. Demons aren’t prominent, we know they are angels who rebelled with Lucifer, and were cast out, so that would be their appearance, but in reference to possession, we basically have those that Jesus encountered and a few his apostles drove out in his name later on.

And what we see are people behaving almost like animals, screaming, shouting, with an inhuman strength to break chains or whatever locals have tried to contain them with, and inflicting a lot of self harm. There’s a woman who would throw herself into fires, a man who had 100 demons in him (where “I am legion” comes from") who would throw himself onto rocks and off cliffs and cut himself, etc.

The more manufactured elements are the head twisting, anything to do with pentagrams, and honestly a lot of the hostility to others. People usually steered clear, but demon possessed individuals generally did more self harm than harming others, with cases where Jesus would meet them within cities, and they weren’t surrounded by dead people or a panicking mob or anything. They also don’t “haunt” or hunt people like they do in movies, but are usually extremely obvious.

Anyway, that’s my experience purely from biblical account, off the top of my head, I’m sure others can add more detail or examples.

Hazzard ,

Happy to help! I like studying this stuff, and it’s fun to share it when I get the chance.

Honestly, I suspect the “demons torture humans in hell” probably originates from their seeming to want to torture the possessed.

Because in the biblical conception of hell, it’s very much not “demons torture humans” it’s more like a lake of fire to torture the demons, which unfortunate humans are also thrown into. There’s no organization or structure whatsoever. Also, nobody is currently there, humans are just… dead, or in purgatory/Gehenna, a sort of neutral waiting place, waiting to be raised back to life at the end, and sorted then.

Their role biblically seems to be just… acting against God, out of spite for being kicked out, perhaps? They seem to act to tempt humans not to find/love/follow God. Not much is given as to their motivations though, the Biblical authors truly aren’t that interested in them, besides as a warning about temptation. A shame, as they’re obviously just… fascinating to learn about, but it’s not a priority for them to write about.

They also aren’t given much credit, either. Rather than the “epic struggle of God vs Satan” we like to characterize, it’s more like… Satan and demons are permitted to roam about, but are absolutely beneath God, and can/will eventually be rounded up and thrown out very quickly. They’re characterized as accidentally playing a role in Gods plan, and given tentative leash for that reason. Satan apparently is even still allowed to visit heaven, and argues with God? See Job. Him getting locked out of heaven permanently is one of the kickoff moments of Revelation/the biblical apocalypse. Again, not much detail on this relationship, and honestly some of even this much detail is speculation.

The modern conception of “hell” is quite interesting, as it’s mostly just imaginative fiction, likely heavily inspired by pagan cultures that merged with Christianity as it spread across the world.

Hazzard ,

Ah yeah, there is some of that? Not totally unfounded, although my understanding is more that Angels know God is there, and always have, so they don’t have to have faith, and they don’t have the “sin nature” we do as a result of Adam and Eve eating that apple. Basically they don’t seem to have that natural selfishness we do, so their relationship with God isn’t as personal, and obedience to him comes much more easily. We are more “like God” (“made in his image”, in Genesis terms). As such, those who do follow God will “rank higher” than angels, whatever that actually looks like.

That said… it’s a bit ridiculous to assert that they don’t have any free will, because a bunch of them rebelled against God. It wouldn’t surprise me if Catholic ideology disagrees with me here though, although I don’t think there’s much of that in the actual text of the Bible.

Hazzard ,

Honestly, I like this idea, just because it means I could block your instance in my app and instantly filter out that kind of content, just like how someone can block lemmynsfw to get rid of almost all porn.

Hazzard ,

Yeah, nothing but respect for Lego here. Tried it, proved it wasn’t viable, chose not to do it just for the PR, and set back out to continue looking for something that actually works.

Fedi Admins of Lemmy, How do you keep your servers up to date without increasing downtime

I am honestly kinda curious how exactly you manage your servers and keep them up to date, I feel like there is a linux patch every week or so, which would usually require a reboot. Do you all deploy live patching, how you become aware of critical stuff in your otherwise busy lives, RSS?

Hazzard ,

Not much of an addition, but you’re absolutely right, in most systems that are expected to be highly available, there’s standard maintenance times, an agreement in place, and no critical use of the system is permitted to be scheduled in that regular time period. Any deployments are limited to that window, in case a rollback is necessary, data sync, etc.

All of that is in addition to the type of high availability stuff you’re describing.

Hazzard , (edited )

I think maybe you’re out of the loop here. This is part of a trend to screw over bots that automatically steal art and sell it on random sites. That’s why others are commenting stuff like “I’d buy this on a t-shirt!”.

The tactic has already been proven to work several times, when people post stuff like this, and then report the shops that steal it to Disney’s legal team. It’s a clever way to leverage Disney’s lawyers to protect regular artists who couldn’t afford to sue all these random websites.

Hazzard ,

Very true. As someone who likes the all feed as a decent way to find new communities and just generally see more content, it’s been a lot of using the “Block Instance” button, and I have NSFW turned off, there’s still an abundance of Lemmynsfw celeb type content. I won’t even consider enabling NSFW until we get that functionality.

Linus Tech Tips pauses production as controversy swirls | What started as criticism over errors in recent YouTube videos has escalated into allegations of sexual harassment, prompting the company t... (www.theverge.com)

Linus Tech Tips pauses production as controversy swirls | What started as criticism over errors in recent YouTube videos has escalated into allegations of sexual harassment, prompting the company t…::The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has halted production after controversies over ethics and accuracy in reporting, spurred...

Hazzard ,

Agreed. The upload schedule has been a holy grail within LTT for a long time, and I truly believe it’s the root of all of this, yes, even the sexual harassment. Or at least how that harassment was handled so poorly. When do you have time to make good HR policies? Pull people into HR for reprimanding? Have opportunities for others to second guess decisions? Do training? Or heck, even just have less tired and irritable people making in-the-moment stupid decisions?

This uncompromising maximum velocity hurts everyone, and I hope they keep never bring it back to this pace, even after the process improvements they have planned.

Hazzard ,

Hmmm, tbh, I don’t think that’s a feature I’d want. Every now and again you see “that guy” furious that he’s getting downvotes, doubling down and trying to start an argument or something. I don’t need that guy showing up in my DMs.

Hazzard ,

Oooh, good point. As an admin/moderator feature, that’s a much better idea.

Hazzard ,

Yeah, having it on your user page is much less dangerous, imo. Still a possibility of getting called out if you downvote someone you’re arguing with, but you’re already in the comments there.

The only way I see a problem is if someone writes a bot or extension that reads the user profile into something “per comment”, and if that gets enough traction and use to build up a strong database. However, in that case, I’d imagine the Lemmy devs would build a feature to let instance admins hide that information from regular users.

Hazzard ,

It’s not being a troll, downvotes are part of the system for a reason: suppressing toxicity. If you downvote a toxic comment to push it down in the algorithm, there shouldn’t be a risk of that toxic person deciding they have a grudge and attacking you personally. Otherwise you risk downvotes not being used for their intended purpose, and an overall more toxic environment.

Hazzard ,

I’m not sure I understand your position here, because voting is such a minor part of the system. A troll that only trolls by upvoting and downvoting isn’t much of a threat, unless they’ve got a dozen alt accounts or a botnet, both of which are different situations that should be handled differently. “The definition of a troll” is ridiculous hyperbole.

And as far as bans are concerned, that’s a moderation problem, not your role as an individual. I’ve never suggested votes should be completely untraceable, that’d be patently ridiculous and remove the ability to actually handle vote manipulation. Moderators and admins should obviously have that access, as I’ve asserted in this thread.

I’m also not advocating my votes be anonymous, I’m fine with having them public on my page. That alone gives you the complete ability to make a judgement about me as a person, or whatever it is you want to do with that. What I’m suggesting is that a user who’s just been downvoted shouldn’t have a trivial way of linking it to the individual who downvoted them in order to harass them.

Frankly, the impression I’m getting is that you’re not actually paying much attention to the case I’ve made, and are instead just using my comments as a platform to have a completely different argument that you’re passionate about. That’s the ONLY way that you could have missed my point so entirely, and come to the conclusion that I could ONLY be a troll or a moron.

Hazzard ,

Eh, there’s a lot of valid things to be skeptical about. Using these tools as a DM is fundamentally different from using them as a massive corporation, as you’re not considering replacing your team of talented artists and writers to cut costs.

That said, done right, I also think this could be amazing. Legally train these models on the wealth of historical D&D art, and provide it to DMs to use during their campaigns to make maps, art for places the DM is describing on the fly, all of these things that no artist could possibly make because these locations are being invented on the fly as the players throw a skilled DM curveballs. D&D feels like an ideal “problem” for a lot of the “solutions” AI has to offer.

Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds (www.wired.com)

Meta conducted an experiment where thousands of users were shown chronological feeds on Facebook and Instagram for three months. Users of the chronological feeds engaged less with the platforms and were more likely to use competitors like YouTube and TikTok. This suggests that users prefer algorithmically ranked feeds that show...

Hazzard ,

I also feel like a lot of the value of chronological is lost if I think it’s algorithmic recommendations. If I don’t know I’m browsing the latest? I’ll likely just think the algorithm is serving up some garbage. Especially somewhere like Facebook, where people haven’t really been curating their feed for years, just… following whoever to be polite and letting the algorithm take care of it.

Hazzard ,

Whoops

Well, happy you’re here!

Hazzard ,

Whoops

Well, happy you’re here!

Hazzard ,

Yeah man, same boat. I actually do have NSFW disabled, but I’ve still blocked at least a dozen or two lemmynsfw communities for actresses, celebs, gentlemenboners, ladyboners, ladyladyboners, just a metric ton of SFW porn communities.

Would make things so much easier if I could outright block the instance, and heck, maybe I’d even turn on NSFW in that case.

Hazzard ,

Even as a Christian myself, I agree with you. Separation of Church and State. Politics mixing with religion has been terrible for both.

Hazzard ,

Eh, that’s the church as an institution. I mean religion in the more abstract sense. Political leanings becoming tied to a religious stance has become ridiculous, and has watered down Christianity quite a lot, to the point where even Trump gets to go pray once a year and call himself the Christian vote. It’s also been remarkably divisive, as naturally, a lot of Christians aren’t that, and hot political debates somehow become religious debates.

Tying religion to politics has allowed politics to slowly pull that horse further and further, to the point where “Christianity” now means southern fundamentalism to a lot, maybe even most, people. I think without political influence, we’d be a lot closer today to how Christianity started, and is meant to look.

Hazzard ,

Yeah, I’ve realized I mostly want “social media” as a place to create discussions. For that, honestly, the smaller community size is perfect.

I find massive communities have a way of devolving into hive minds. Once you reach a critical mass of people who think one thing, any comment to the contrary is just… obliterated, whether by an exhausting amount of argument, or downvotes. And then it just becomes known that that’s the opinion of the community, and people stop even bringing it up. At least that’s my theory on how it happens.

Over here, with a smaller community size, I’m finding a lot more genuine conversation, no matter the topic. It’s awesome. And I’m still finding Lemmy large enough to bring me interesting links and memes to talk about.

Are any of your friends on the fediverse too? If not, have you tried to get them to join?

I’ve been telling a lot of people about it, but everyone’s a skeptic. I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they’re just going to wait to see which Reddit clone comes out on top before switching. Most of them haven’t heard of the other parts of the fediverse like mastodon. I’d like to leave fb/instagram, but like...

Hazzard ,

I’ve recommended it to my friends, but they’ve instead chosen to take the fall of Reddit as an opportunity to just… step back from the internet. One friend just… isn’t browsing Reddit at all on mobile anymore, and is instead just using old.reddit.com on desktop, and culled most of the subs he used to follow, keeping only some small communities.

I respect it, but still feel something like Reddit has a place in my life, but have no faith whatsoever in Reddit itself, and the apps are better here, so I’m completely switched over. I imagine they may still move here in time. Lemmy is a part of my life now, so I’ll continue to mention it and share links to things from it, but I’ve no desire to force the issue.

Hazzard ,

Is this whole comment section really about one comment from six years ago, where all he stated is that he’s grateful his wife wasn’t aborted (I’m assuming that was considered)?

Because I find it hard to take that as all that damming. From the tone of the conversation here, I was expecting several comments over the years stating extremes like that abortion should be illegal, or that rape victims should be denied access to it.

Do we even know that he knew about any of this scandal with March for Life in 2017? Especially if he’s not supported it since (which I assume this article would bother to include if he had?)

Hazzard ,

Gotta be Google Play Music I’m still bitter about. YouTube music doesn’t hold a candle to it, and I’ve never quite been as happy with Spotify or Apple Music. Getting YT Premium with a good music service was great too, but they shot themselves in the foot.

And there’s was just… no reason for it. They even delayed its death when they realized how crap YT Music was, and then later just… decided to do it anyways.

Hazzard ,

I used an extension a while ago that changed CSS colour values () into little coloured dots, that became a colour picker when clicking on them (while still letting you input RGB or Hex, ofc), and it was pretty awesome!

So, I could unironically see this being really nice. Although… I think this would need a pretty narrow context, something like if x == true would look pretty confusing as a toggle, I imagine. But assigning x = true? Bring it on.

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