I’ll back this up, and recommend people having a hard time look into Spell Labs on the steam workshop (and elsewhere) to help get further into the game. Once the game really clicks, it’s super satisfying. Even before then, the ridiculous wonder of all the things are great. It’s just as hard as it is amazing and that can be a turn off. There are other quality of life mods available in the workshop for people wanting to just enjoy the game, but the tutorial in Spell Labs is one of the biggest helps I got in unlocking progression.

Noita Together sessions were the big thing that turned the game into an obsession for me.

Hahaha. I think when they say crimes, I think they mean doing drugs and having sex. So largely nothing actually harmful unless the person passes out.

We don’t even get this memo. I thought it was still 15, 18, and 20. And I’m wholey against mandatory tipping, but always do so because I don’t want the underpaid staff to starve. I have enough friends in food service who can barely pay their rent with multiple roommates.

And minimum wage isn’t a liveable wage in most of the US now. Well, unless you split rent amongst 4 working people in a single bedroom apartment. That’s only an exaggeration in some of the US.

I only really saw that in grade school. And it was a Red Scare thing. Super culty, but so is all the McCarthy stuff.

They say it’s to prevent crime. Same as a lot of the awful things we come to expect. I’m willing to bet it doesn’t do anything noticeable with respect to crime.

There’s a health food craze in the US that stemmed out of rampant body shaming. Which might be largely because of American portion sizes. And they think that nutritional fat makes you fat. It doesn’t. Excessive calories make you fat. And even that has caveats, but it’s the best rule of thumb.

When did we start splitting milk? I know part of it is to make cream and high fat stuff while repurposing the skimmed off grass water. ::Googles:: WWII as a means of selling the byproduct of butter. Okay. Then in the 50s physicians started calling it health food despite the fact that the fat is used in your body during the digestion of many fat soluble vitamins such as A, D, E, and K, and thus skim milk is pretty close to the opposite of health food.

And the money thing is kind of rampant. It’s a big reason why things with larger price tags, like Rolex watches, are thought to more impressive by Americans than equivalent or better watches. Rolexes do have a very high quality, but then the mark up on top makes it strictly something I do not respect, and others do not share that opinion with me. Same for a lot of things.

Not necessarily the case, but if it’s affecting your life so strongly, you might want to get checked by a medical professional.

Long COVID can destroy your life. Depression can destroy your life. Iron deficiency can ruin your life. A lot of things you might just think is just being tired may actually have a cause. Especially if simple fixes like “touch grass” style clichés do nothing for you.

It’s not always the answer, but it’s good to rule out in that case.

I love discord, for what it’s for. Quick synchronous talks you will never refer back to again. So not software development where indexable logs of information are necessary. I know discord has indexing, and now some form of forum. But every discord I’ve been to for development (especially modding communities) has a large corpus of synchronous logs where people get annoyed if you ask a question that was answered one before a long time ago with extremely common language making it nearly impossible to search for because the keywords have been used out of context of your question hundreds of times since the question was asked.

If the Dev communities used the forums mode in discord more, it wouldn’t always solve it, but it’d be much better. There are better places than discord for these things, but I have been trying to meet people where they’re established.

Recalling data, communication. Two things humans are notoriously bad at…

And I wouldn’t call a human intelligent if TV was anything to go by. Unfortunately, humans do things they don’t understand constantly and confidently. It’s common place, and you could call it fake it until you make it, but a lot of times it’s more of people thinking they understand something.

LLMs do things confident that they will satisfy their fitness function, but they do not have the ability to see farther than that at this time. Just sounds like politics to me.

I’m being a touch facetious, of course, but the idea that the line has to be drawn upon that term, intelligence, is a bit too narrow for me. I prefer to use the terms Artificial Narrow Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence as they are better defined. Narrow referring to it being designed for one task and one task only, such as LLMs which are designed to minimize a loss function of people accepting the output as “acceptable” language, which is a highly volatile target. AGI or Strong AI is AI that can generalize outside of its targeted fitness function and continuously. I don’t mean that a computer vision neural network that is able to classify anomalies as something that the car should stop for. That’s out of distribution reasoning, sure, but if it can reasonably determine the thing in bounds as part of its loss function, then anything that falls significantly outside can be easily flagged. That’s not true generalization, more of domain recognition, but it is important in a lot of safety critical applications.

This is an important conversation to have though. The way we use language is highly personal based upon our experiences, and that makes coming to an understanding in natural languages hard. Constructed languages aren’t the answer because any language in use undergoes change. If the term AI is to change, people will have to understand that the scientific term will not, and pop sci magazines WILL get harder to understand. That’s why I propose splitting the ideas in a way that allows for more nuanced discussions, instead of redefining terms that are present in thousands of ground breaking research papers over a century, which will make research a matter of historical linguistics as well as one of mathematical understanding. Jargon is already hard enough as it is.

The term AI is older than the idea of machine learning. AI is a rectangle where machine learning is a square. And deep learning is a unit square.

Please, don’t muddy the waters. That’s what caused the AI winter of 1960. But do go after the liars. I’m all for that.

The term AI is older than the idea of machine learning. AI is a rectangle where machine learning is a square. And deep learning is a unit square.

Please, don’t muddy the waters. That’s what caused the AI winter of 1960. But do go after the liars. I’m all for that.

… Alexa literally is A.I.? You mean to say that Alexa isn’t AGI. AI is the taking of inputs and outputting something rational. The first AI’s were just large if-else complications called First Order Logic. Later AI utilized approximate or brute force state calculations such as probabilistic trees or minimax search. AI controls how people’s lines are drawn in popular art programs such as Clip Studio when they use the helping functions. But none of these AI could tell me something new, only what they’re designed to compute.

The term AI is a lot more broad than you think.

I tried to get into BCI for both personal reasons and for prosthetic reasons. I admit being able to control my computer faster, and draw/play things faster and more accurately was the goal for myself, but the greater good of improved prosthetics was always on my mind and so fascinating to follow progress on.

When I got called for an initial interview with Neurolink, I turned it down, an entry-ish position for what was at the time my dream job, just because I heard the name Elon and would never work for a two bit hack that thinks 80 hours a week is the minimum time you should spend if you want to make any difference (paraphrased direct quote from the man who “works” 120 hours a week according to himself, and sleeps at his desk a solid chunk of that according to his employees).

If we do ever get transhumanism, it will be too expensive to be for the greater good. Only the rich, who have proven themselves incapable of initiating positive change without financial incentive, will be able to afford it for many generations.

It’s only being careful if you’re immunocompromised in some way that would make the vaccine actually dangerous, which is even rarer than side effects being more than soreness.

COVID isn’t a well known virus. The fact that it destroys the nerves between your nose and tongue and your brain is a HUGE red flag that should be terrifying to everyone. Nerves are very similar throughout the body, and we don’t know the full extent of damage caused by it yet. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which may or may not be the same thing as long COVID considering it is generally caused by various viral infections, is incredibly not well known, but affects far less people supposedly. Maybe the fact that 25% estimated last I checked of people get at a minimum mild long COVID symptoms, and 10% of those never really recover, with most people reporting lowered energy levels permanently (not like enough to be a disability for most) will help drive more research, as there’s a lot of cases of COVID permanently screwing over perfectly healthy people.

I mention here one of the least devastating aspects of ME/CFS and similarly long COVID which share a lot of symptoms. There are people who cannot stand up without assistance because of them. People have lost jobs due to them. And in America, not having a job means not having decent healthcare or any sort of benefits.

Being careful means getting the damn vaccine if you can, when you can, as soon as your doctor tells you that you are healthy enough to do so, every single time. If not for you, then for anyone you care about. Care about human life, get the vaccine.

Hannah Montana Linux. Do I have to explain?

This. A lot of kids drove golf carts to the pool and stuff, but while that would be semi-legal in their gated community, they had to cross a public road where even licensed drivers would be breaking the law. No one seemed to care though. I’m fairly certain it’s illegal in most US states.

Most boomers I know still can’t use a mouse. Millennials and gen X fill most of the old Internet in my mind, but the original '91 Internet was a lot of tech focused boomers, but also was significantly Gen X. '95-'99 seemed to pick up more traction with my generation.

As a cat owner, can confirm cats are always bad. The best bad decisions I’ve made, are my two little fuzz balls. And I hope they’re happy with me as well.

They are the reason we don’t have a Christmas tree anymore.