The most existentially terrifying thing about it is that it’s not about education or overall intelligence, but personality. And even then, there’s an emotional edge to it that may catch people in particularly vulnerable states.

Like a virus is a load of DNA being driven by a questionably alive entity, AI is a load of emotional signal being driven by a questionably conscience one (though I still argue not, I think the analogy stands). Education and intelligence can help ward it some, but people are complex and there’s no telling what subsystems or random strings it manages to hook onto.

I have a background in CS and AI (from the early 00’s, don’t be too impressed) and have friends in linguistics. ML and more specifically LLMs have been on my radar for a long while and I am aware of their possible uses, but I’m tired of having to hedge every conversation around it. What we need to do is cultivate a strong social and cultural boundary for ourselves.

I heard someone say that the only thing AI should be used for is stuff people never should have been doing in the first place, things like catching spam/phishing out of your email. GenAI is just pure abomination.

Isn’t this one of Zitron’s oft-cited horsemen?

Hah, lustful longing.

Terry Pratchett is a classic of course. I was making my way through publication order, but can’t remember where I stopped at this point.

As for the lesbian smut, definitely give The Starving Saints a look. Not spicy, but more the painful aching, if that’s your thing.

Oh yes! I’ve read Perdido Street Station and The Scar and greatly enjoyed them. I should get back to checking out more of his stuff, I know Iron Council is also in that setting but I’m not sure of much else. I tried Un Lun Dun back in the day and while it was fun, it was a little too YA for me.

I read a lot of fantasy when I was younger but gradually fell out of love with the genre. It started to feel really trope heavy and I got tired of everything feeling like it needed to be a 3-5+ novel epic series that was so enamored with its own world-building it felt more like a history lesson. Perhaps my choices on reading material were to blame, but still. I moved onto sci-fi and fiction for a good while.

I’ve been trying to rekindle my passion for it with one off “weird” fiction. Standalone stories that are just interested in doing weird stuff, whatever that may entail. It’s not well-defined and if anyone has any recommendations I’d be happy to hear them but so far some of my best discovies,

• The West Passage, Jared Pechaček. A palace the size of a city ruled over by giant, eldritch ladies and mired in ancient bureaucracies is threatened by a forgotten prophecy. I like it because it doesn’t overexplain its world, it just throws a bunch of interesting events and scenery at you while gesturing at the architecture of the world that holds it up, leading you to speculate on the mystery of it all.
• The Starving Saints, Caitlin Starling. Claustrophobic, horrifying, vaguely sapphic. It follows the storylines of a knight, a nun, and a peasant girl trapped in a castle under siege. As supplies diminish and things are looking grim, their saints miraculously appear to save them but not all is at it appears etc. etc. Just a good read, I liked this one a lot
• Currently reading: Mad Sisters of Esi, Tashan Mehta. This one got off to a bit of an uneven start but it’s an interesting mashup of myth and sci-fi where the universe is referred to as the black sea, planets are islands, and spaceship may be literally ships with sails. Not done with it yet, but enjoying it as it has strong characters and a good emotional core.

I kind of unironically believe that speedrunning is a core pillar of the internet and maybe also even kind of humaity as a whole, going forward? Stick with me here.

Speedrunning is a self-organizing, self-policing culture built off the back of competitive/cooperative play. Despite centering around somewhat corporate products like videogames and having big events like GDQ, it’s not really centralized in any meaningful way. It’s driven by fan enthusiasm to draw in new people and push limits further. That also incentivizes identifying people who would cheat the system.

Extrapolating on that, as we move into a post-scarcity society with various exigent AI threats, there’s going to be a lot of concern with how we choose to spend our time and brainpower. Using play to collectively push our limits, tear apart code, and identify flaws is gonna be a big thing.

Sorry if that was poorly worded, I’m working on some big ideas here and I don’t know how to convey them well. I know that all sounds kind of silly, and it surely is to some extent, but I do think there’s more there than meets the eye if you just initially handwave it away as “playing videogames really fast for fun”.

Steam really ought to learn their lessons, Tim is only trying to help. They’re still crippled from their decision not to allow blockchain games while Epic used the opportunity to eat their lunch /s

I’m constantly struck by the imagery of the giant warrior from Nausicaa. There is a timeline or a reality where this worked, but they couldn’t help themselves. They woke the beast up the second it was even halfway possible and now it’s tearing itself apart in self-destructive blasts because the whole thing was under-cooked (and probably the completely wrong direction to begin with).

If there’s any consolation here it’s that hopefully this has soured enough people on the idea that a second effort won’t even get off the ground. I hope …

There’s never going to be a “Year of the Linux Desktop” where there’s some critical inflection point like a lot of people think. But Microsoft has fucked up here in assuming that consumer trust is a linear relationship and it’s not. They broke the trust, the cracks are there, and users will keep bleeding. They’ll keep a certain percentage of users through apathy or complacency, but the momentum is flowing in reverse now.

What it takes for any one person to cross over is going to look different, whether that’s Linux getting up to speed on a feature they were looking for or Microsoft crossing yet another unacceptable threshold, but despite all my anger and personal grievances aside, I truly believe Microsoft as a company is incapable of correcting this problem.

Their goals are entirely misaligned, they believe they can dictate the market at the consumer and their revenue is dependent on that. They’re bleeding more money and talent through this AI debacle and that’s making them even less capable of facing and addressing the issues. Unfortunately I don’t think they’ll ever fully implode, but just like Chrome eventually ate IE’s market share and now won’t go away, so it will be with Linux.

Bonus points: I’m calling it, I truly do believe that in ~5 years or so Windows will cease to be its own operating system and start shifting towards a Linux distro with a bespoke DE (again, see Chrome/Edge). They don’t want to have to keep maintaining an OS like this and one of the biggest arguments for doing so has been the backwards compatibility, but everything is cloud and SaaS now and they want to push more business customers in that direction anyway. Server will be a thorn in their side for awhile, but consumer facing Windows distro will be the perfect testing ground. Mark it, ~5 years … EEE

Benn Jordan is a gem, do yourself a favor and just go watch all his stuff.

His latest on robot dogs is amazingly well-executed and researched with terrifying conclusions.

Yeah, nothing will help attract players like diluting any weak identity it already had with an open deluge of metaverse slop. Everything will be everything. It’s not enough to have a product anymore, it has to be a whole ecosystem. God forbid a single bloody dollar slip through your grasp.

House of El - AL: OpenAI’s $1 Trillion Bullsh*t Is Falling Apart

This video covers the topic very well (and I appreciate and recommend her channel overall).

The long and the short of it is, they fucked their product up. Most of us here are not terribly fond of AI, but let’s for a moment just take it for granted that it is a product that does a thing. OpenAI will swap models out on the backend based on your use case and if it detects certain patterns, also as a sort of protective guard rails in some ways. It’s also extremely unclear on billing and token usage (paraphrasing, I’m not intimately familiar with the details myself, watch the video). This is highly problematic if you’re trying to build a service on top of it. AI is extremely finicky and not having clear ideas on token usage limit or what models may be running on the backend can affect that. This has rightly made even the devout users upset at these choices.

And from what I understand in the video, this is not a case with other providers where you stick with exactly the specified model and token usage and billing are more clearly indicated.

So now not only are they fighting a losing battle against the profitability of the entire tech and service model, they have a spurned and dwindling customer base to contend with, too. They are turbo fucked. Still, no one can say how or when this all finally goes tits up, but at least it’s kind of funny.

What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?

Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.

I sympathize, even just from the trailer I did have expectations and there was a bit of friction for the first hour or two as I had to work past them and meet the game where it’s at. As someone very familiar with all of the influences it draws from, this can be kinda difficult.

For the right person, this is going to be a GotY candidate.

The discourse around this one is going to be brutal already I can tell. As you say, it really is just a matter of taste and at the end of the day there’s no arguing that if this isn’t your kind of thing it’s not going to click. But it does frustrate me some already seeing people so confidently assert their taste as “simply bad game design”. So it goes, I can only argue on the internet so much, but I do want Yacht Club to do well and I want the game to find its audience without being turned off by disingenuous reviews. After Shovel Knight and this, I can see they have serious chops and I’m praying they stick around long enough to get another few games out before the industry eats them alive T_T

The game is absolutely fantastic, I plan to do a writeup here once I’ve progressed through a bit more of the game. I’m 14 hours in and partway through the 3rd of 7(?) main dungeons, largely because I’ve been picking every last scrap of meat off the bones. If I had to use one word to describe the game it would be dense. I didn’t play the demo, so I was a bit surprised to find it has less in common with Link’s Awakening and Castlevania than you might think, though it’s certainly wearing their skin. I’d call it Saturday morning cartoon Bloodborne with a heaping helping of adorable, furry characters and I mean that all 💯 positively.

Unlike Link’s Awakening, progression isn’t tied to finding items in dungeons. A lot of traversal is tied to subweapons you find unceremoniously strewn about the world that opens things up for you and you can really go most anywhere you want if you can figure it out. Instead of simply navigating each screen there are secrets and bones tucked in almost every corner encouraging you to observe, explore, and platform every inch. Dense.

There’s already discourse about the difficulty and if I give one concession, it’s that the early game is perhaps a bit “overtuned” like Silksong was, partially because the early game power curve is just rough when you don’t have a lot of stats or options to work with and part of it is maybe spending ~6 years in the oven. Stick with it, it’s worth it. Go slow, be deliberate, and I promise you losing your bones is not that big of a deal. Grinding is actually fairly easy and painless once you figure things out and if you decide to go that route (grinding is not necessary but you can absolutely do it if you want to accrue an early edge with a lot of items). Other than that, use the build in modifiers. They disable achievements, but also some of those achievements are just ass anyways and there’s no way I’m 100%ing this game (beat the game without ever entering the underlab, are you for serious?!)

Starter tips:

1. The game moves fast in the beginning and doesn’t run you through a tutorial but it WILL lead you into most things if you give it a chance, just pay attention and try everything on everything.
2. There’s a manual in the start menu! It’s cute and informative, read it, it actually contains helpful info
3. The game does a great job of pointing you down the optimal, beginner’s path if you read the newspapers, listen to the NPCs, and just pay attention to clues. Knowing where to go is half the battle, but you can always explore and push into other places early and get some nice treats for it. Be creative, you’ll be surprised the places you can go

Ultimately, this is a game for sickos. If you are a sicko, especially a Fromsoft sicko, then this is a no-brainer.

US taxes are the worst homework you can imagine. Do them poorly and you end up fined even deeper in a hole or possibly jail. Do them correctly and you get to fund a genocide! Woo!

I don’t normally like indulging in speculation and I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but suicide is very deep, dark pit of despair. It’s a last resort for end of the rope, no other options, extreme loss.

If I’m in a position like this where my testimony is being used to move forward a case against a giant corporation doing harm to others, I’m hanging on. At least until that’s accomplished. That’s the motivation, that’s the light. To get your voice heard and have an impact. Suicide nullifies that. As does murder … and yeah it sure seems like one party is more invested in not having his voice heard.

Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!

My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!

Nah, I’m another nano guy. You can set up syntax highlighting for it you know?

It’s not that any one is better than the other, it’s up to your use cases. I’ve learned vim a few times in my life already (and mostly just know the hjkl bindings from playing tons of terminal roguelikes) but it always decays because I don’t put the knowledge to use. Because it just doesn’t fit my use case.

I write small scripts, some Python and stuff and I’ll usually use PyCharm to debug that these days. So nano is relegated to the small tasks like config editing or quick, in place fixes to scripts.