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mindbleach

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mindbleach ,

If you bring him back without his wife, he’s going to politely explain why you should, and you’re gonna wipe a tear from your eye and agree with him.

mindbleach ,

That’s some straight-up Welcome To Night Vale medical horror. Like a plague of fatal politeness, or Langdon’s basilisk. Which in D&D might just be a photograph of an actual basilisk.

edit: Wait, no, they actually did that in Doctor Who. Donna had that thing on her back that could only disguise itself through the first dozen reflections.

mindbleach ,

Or questionable Game Of Thrones novels.

mindbleach ,

Surely that’s punk Klingons.

Or would punk Klingons go “Excuse me, what kind of IPA do you have on tap?”

mindbleach ,

Any idiot can check Stack Overflow and produce ugly code that barely works.

It takes a genuine professional idiot to check Stack Overflow and produce beautiful code that barely works.

mindbleach ,

As opposed to previously, when Israel respected Palestinians and their borders.

This is a geopolitical version of “I’m not touching you” that involves sniping the limbs off of children.

mindbleach ,

They fucked it up completely in a way that raises questions of competence.

HTML has ways to display angle brackets specifically intended to never be interpreted as tags. “Entity names” will never be code. There’s not even a sensible way to do it deliberately, like %20 nonsense.

mindbleach ,

They still fuck up “Did you mean…?” to ignore whatever you wrote. Somewhere in the last decade that went from “haha whoops you’re right” to “stop talking over me, robot.”

mindbleach ,

Seems like both armies versus civilians.

There’s not many other conflicts where I can remark “two war crimes don’t make a right” damn near every time.

mindbleach ,

Zapp: “I’ve never been so happy to get beat up by a woman.”

Leela: “Let’s do it again sometime.”

mindbleach ,

Jill of the Jungle, if you like Commander Keen era PC platformers.

mindbleach ,

Single newlines get eaten by Markdown.

mindbleach ,

They haven’t started an international incident in at least… five years.

mindbleach ,

Conservatism is built on hierarchy. Capitalism just says markets work and investment is gambling. You can do that and still keep everyone fed / clothed / sheltered, specifically because markets work, and can make food / clothes / shelter more plentiful. Some people having more doesn’t require private space station versus duplex cardboard box.

Conservatives only say market failure demands misery and successful gambling means unchecked power because that’s what they always say. That’s their only conclusion, applied to literally everything. That’s how conservatives think things work. The entire tribal worldview boils down to “well somebody’s gotta be king.” Just a fractal pyramid of militaries over empire, rulers over courts, owners over workers, and patriarchs over families. If you’re at the bottom you’re lucky to be alive, and how dare you question your betters.

The unspoken assumption is that change is impossible. This is genuinely how they think everything works. Like the universe itself dictates a steep gradient, and the only way things could be different is by shuffling around who goes where. So if someone is suffering, they must have fucked up to deserve it, and if you want to help them, you’re putting someone else in their place.

mindbleach ,

People without money mostly need money.

Somehow this is surprising and confusing… primarily to people who cannot imagine change.

mindbleach ,

Bitrates complicate this, because they predate modern computing. It’s information theory. Radio signal transmission genuinely can measure in partial bits. And all bandwidth is described in plain metric prefixes.

So you can have an 8000 kbps video, lasting one second, and it weighs 976 KB.

mindbleach ,

Original Quake

Good news!

mindbleach ,

Deus Ex. It’s beloved and influential. It’s also ugly as hell and kinda jank. Stitch together all the levels that had loading screens. Leave combat awkward, make conversations fancier. Keep the deadpan protagonist as a flat player-insert avatar. Keep tracked music, but give the composer a pile of money and enough tools to allow conditional variations. Human Revolution proved the formula still worked, and Mankind Divided proved it’s still impossible to do a good sequel to that formula.

Midwinter is one of the first true-3D open-world games, and it shows. You’re trying to escape an island and maybe start a revolution on the way out. The title reflects the mildly post-apocalyptic setting, where nuclear winter has upended civilization, and this little snow-covered dictatorship is actually doing okay by some standards. The gameplay would have to borrow from Death Stranding’s focus on traversing terrain. Albeit largely on skis. It’s not a fuck-around simulator like Just Cause, or a shoot-em-up like Far Cry, and it’s not really a survival game in the sense of keeping gauges filled. (You do get to hang-glide - but it’s a great way to die suddenly.) It’s more of a wargame played from ground level. And between that, and being from 1990, the interface is completely terrible.

mindbleach ,

Psy-ops.

[Survey] Can you tell which images are AI generated? (forms.gle)

Hey everyone. I made a casual survey to see if people can tell the difference between human-made and AI generated art. Any responses would be appreciated, I’m curious to see how accurately people can tell the difference (especially those familiar with AI image generation)

mindbleach ,

Some of these seem unfair because - if they’re real images, they’re images that resemble common errors, and if they’re generated, they’re examples of those errors being situational enough to look ambiguous. I can tell you what I’m looking at in each image. I can tell you where I’ve seen that misplaced or overused in a ton of generated images. But I can also tell you what humans tend to scribble out that might’ve been picked up by machines without me noticing, and I can explain some that-looks-suspect locations as mundane physical artifacts.

You could argue that’s the point - demonstrating how far the technology has come in basically one year. But there’s some cases where damn near anything is plausible, so long as it’s locally sensible. Any close-up of a face might be from the “this person does not exist” kind of network, because with eight billion people on Earth, yeah, I’ll believe that’s a guy. But if you show me three pictures of the same alleged guy, I’m gonna know whether it’s a real dude or a machine hallucination. Nature photos are similarly hard because nature’s kinda anything-goes. Drawings, even moreso. There’s not much difference between an AI going nuts on waterfalls because it has poor segmentation and a human who wanted to draw a clusterfuck of waterfalls.

Here’s what I’m looking at in each image. Her thumb’s too good behind the glass, even if her fingernails are a little weird and the bench seat’s not quite the same color on either side. His glasses are the only thing that’s a little off, especially the gray-looking hairs on only his right temple, even though both could be perspective. His everything’s too smooth; if this isn’t generated then someone airbrushed a photo to death. Sketchy lines going nowhere and multiple approximations of a shape had me assume human over computer, but the bench’s third leg and janked-up shadow point to a computer or a shitty artist. This guy looks filtered instead of drawn, but it might just be scratched instead of drawn, and honestly his wonky hold on the book is less concerning than the other image’s bench. Perspective’s all fucked-up and I’m unsure why the mouse is in a bucket, but the most computery parts are the fine detail in distant waves and up-close spray, because the high frequency doesn’t match the drawing style. Except the next image has detailed asymmetrical elements and some smoke in front that only makes sense locally so I assumed these were human / generated pairs and marked the boat one as more-likely human. Fine stripey detail and repetition are suspect, as mentioned, make enough sense in this context that the distant foliage is almost more concerning. Rough painting originally had me mark this as human, versus the previous image, but where fine details appear (e.g. bottom left corner) they don’t make any sense for a human to have focused on. Either a person did a shit job drawing those horses and really scribbled out a city, or this is exactly the sort of disordered localized detail some models add. (Honestly the scale birds and bottom-left white scribble are the only things that look like ‘sloppy human’ versus ‘sloppy computer.’) God rays on craggy waterfalls are the hardest call because humans might also draw this geological uncertainty; I marked it as generated because the smaller fall to the right finishes plausibly but starts from nowhere. Soft glow forest mountains are a generated cliche at this point. Monotonic crisp layers are not. Only the English text and rounded speech-bubble tail are tells at this point. An ice cream cat seems like the kind of dumb shit you’d ask an AI to do, but this is a tough call: there’s three different kinds of “strawberry” here and they’re not bungled together, but the pay and cookie placement seem bizarre in light of the rim of the fish-cone, and the placement of the beads is either cause for criticism of a human artist or shockingly flexible for a network. Lego image one could go either way. But Lego image two has cliche composition, an impossibly detailed plastic scarf, and asymmetric nonsense prints on her legs. Cat one is painted with consistent brushstrokes on everything but the whiskers. Cat two is either a painting filter or a person drawing badly from a photo reference. Cat three is the same warm-glow cliche that’s easy to do on a computer, and if a human did that with actual paint, bravo.

11/20.

Everything photographic, I nailed. You picked some some lackluster human art.

mindbleach ,

That artist also forgot reins. And the front wheels of the carriage are goofy. And the city is a bunch of squiggles. And there’s a bizarre oversaturated smear of farmland in the distance. It’s the sort of human drawing that makes people go ‘did AI draw this?’ because a year ago they would’ve just said ‘this kinda sucks.’

The psychedelic waterfall one has the opposite problem, where the tree at left immediately had me go ‘that’s a robot,’ but it is also how humans draw when they’ve done quite a lot of drugs. Anywhere besides a landscape it would be inexcusable. But there’s every reason you might want to draw a tree, that way. An anime character eating ramen - not so much.

mindbleach ,

And if your local number was busy and you dialed another, it could cost a metric shitload of money, because long-distance was apparently transmitted on the finest golden threads honed by fifth-generation artisans.

One of the weirdest generational gaps we almost never talk about is how we got to ‘of course you can talk to anyone anytime’ immediately after decades of ‘hey you wanna meet up for a burger?’ costing more than the burger.

mindbleach ,

Privacy and secrecy aren’t the same thing.

What I do on the toilet isn’t a secret. I still don’t want to find out you know any specific details.

mindbleach ,

That is visibly not cheese.

Or macaroni.

mindbleach ,

I love chocolate syrup, but it doesn’t belong on cheese or pasta.

mindbleach ,

This user thinks Jimmy Hoffa proves all unions forever are bad, but demands rock-solid proof that Jordan Peterson does the thing he’s primarily known for doing.

Leave.

mindbleach , (edited )

And people will go ‘you didn’t buy it!’ like it doesn’t say “Buy” right fuckin’ there.

mindbleach ,

Poor.

mindbleach ,

It’s a comspiracy to convince people Moonwalker wasn’t faked!

mindbleach ,

AAAAAUUUGHHHHH!!!

mindbleach ,

Loyalists, that’s who. People who’ve declared their allegiance to a team and therefore must defend anything and everything their team does, because criticism is betrayal.

They think that’s all you’re doing, by the way. They think that’s all there is.

mindbleach ,

‘This is bad.’

‘No, another thing is bad.’

Right, sorry, only one problem allowed at a time.

mindbleach ,

“Truly, it was a paradise.”

“And all you had to put up with was one really annoying Star Trek fan.”

“… let’s get the hell out of here.”

mindbleach ,

Daniel Dennet: “Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events, could explain consciousness at all.”

mindbleach ,

320 kbps is approaching lossless audio compression bitrates.

Opus does better in about half the space. And goes down to comically low bitrates. And his obscenely small latency. It’s not simple, but hot dang, is it good.

The Quite Okay Imaging guy did a Quite Okay Audio follow-up, aiming for aggressive simplicity and sufficient performance, but it’s fixed at a bitrate of 278 kbps for stereo. It’s really competing with ADPCM for sound effects in video games.

Personally, I think an aggressively simple frequency-domain format could displace MP3 as a no-brainer music library format, circa 128 kbps. All you have to do is get forty samples out of sixty-four bits. Bad answers are easy and plentiful. The trick is, when each frame barely lasts a millisecond, bad answers might work anyway.

mindbleach ,

I don’t give a shit which debugging format any platform picks, but if they could each pick one that every emulator reads and every compiler emits, that’d be fucking great.

mindbleach ,

One per-thing is fine.

mindbleach , (edited )

Don’t forget ; is a comment in assembly.

For extra fun, did you know // wasn’t standardized until C99? Comments in K&R C are all /* */. Possibly the most tedious commending format ever devised.

mindbleach , (edited )

Batch files also use REM. Or ::. Each of which causes syntax errors in completely different scenarios.

M4 says it uses #, but that’s an echo, and dnl is for real comments.

CSS still forces K&R style, but on reflection, that’s nothing compared to HTML’s ⋖!-- --> nonsense. (Edit: or Lemmy’s idiotic erasure of HTML-like blocks. If they’re not allowed… show them as text, fools.)

mindbleach ,

in the appropriate column.

Alright that’s just hideous.

Forth uses ``, and can do block comments with ( and ), except ) is optional in interpreted mode.

Algol 60 used ¢. ¢ isn’t even in ASCII, so god knows how that “your two cents” joke ever happened. How can a language this boring still exemplify how all programmers are dorks?

Visual Basic uses ’ because go fuck yourself. QBASIC origins or not, I don’t know how this shipped without at least one meeting where somebody got stabbed. Even the Systems Hungarian heretics should have recoiled in horror.

mindbleach ,

APL is its own special hell, on this front. A programming language you need a custom keyboard to type is like saying your favorite map projection is a globe. D-, did not read assignment.

mindbleach ,

If it’s all day, seek medical attention.

mindbleach ,

There have been genuine efforts to do that. Obviously (well, for a very niche use of “obviously”) it’s not always possible, but detecting infinite loops isn’t like the uncertainty principle.

It’s called The Terminator.

mindbleach ,

… wait, how does that work? Total internal reflection happens at the boundary to a lower index of refraction.

mindbleach ,

Motivation to discuss anything with you goes flying out the window, if you think ending marijuana prohibition is anything but positive for the common people. And you’re going to drop that turd in a completely unrelated punchbowl.

mindbleach ,

Talk less.

mindbleach ,

which is still a recognizable derivative of the original

Not in twelve bytes.

Deep models are a statistical distillation of a metric shitload of data. Smaller models with more training on more data don’t get worse, they get more abstract - and in adversarial uses they often kick big networks’ asses.

mindbleach ,

“Emancipation.”

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