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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Don’t misunderestimate Dubya. Irregardless of his policies, he coined words and phrases like Shakespeare. How many of use of dreamed of human beings and fish coexisting peacefully? How many of us strive to put food on our families and buy most of our imports from overseas? Don’t we all want to know “is our children learning?” And who can forget that famous Texas proverb “fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can’t get fooled again.


  • The end game is to avoid legal consequences for their actions. These people don’t understand the legal system and believe it works like an arcane magic system. If they send the right letters to the right people, they can make all their problems go away.

    In this case, they believe there is a letter they can send someone that causes that person to owe them 1 gold bar per month unless that person performs some kind of action. This one sounds like it was sent to the New York State courts in an attempt to get them to drop legal action against them (or give them gold).

    Searching “notice of liability” gets you a bunch of conspiracy theory websites with templates and instructions.


  • My understanding of quantum computers is that they’re great a brute forcing stuff, but machine learning is just a lot of calculations, not brute forcing.

    If you want to know the square root of 25, you don’t need to brute force it. There’s a direct way to calculate the answer and traditional computers can do it just fine. It’s still going to take a long time if you need to calculate the square root of a billion numbers.

    That’s basically machine learning. The individual calculations aren’t difficult, there’s just a lot to calculate. However, if you have 2 computers doing the calculations, it’ll take half the time. It’ll take even less time if you fill a data center with a cluster of 100,000 GPUs.




  • It’s mostly the training/machine learning that is power hungry.

    AI is essentially a giant equation that is generated via machine learning. You give it a prompt with an expected answer, it gets run through the equation, and you get an output. That output gets an error score based on how far it is from the expected answer. The variables of the equation are then modified so that the prompt will lead to a better output (one with a lower error).

    The issue is that current AI models have billions of variables and will be trained on billions of prompts. Each variable will be tuned based on each prompt. That’s billions to the power of billions of calculations. It takes a while. AI researchers are of course looking for ways to speed up this process, but so far it’s mostly come down to dividing up these billions of calculations over millions of computers. Powering millions of computers is where the energy costs come from.

    Unless AI models can be trained in a way that doesn’t require running a billion squared calculations, they’re only going to get more power hungry.






  • I absolutely hate always online DRM in single player games, so I get it. Personally, I’ll avoid games that use it. I was a huge fan of the Hitman series but haven’t played any of the new ones because of always online, live service, season pass, model they decided to go with. It’s a deal breaker for me, but I understand it isn’t for everyone else. I told my friends I wouldn’t be playing Helldivers 2 with them because of its use of kernel level anti-cheat and they just gave me a weird look.

    I’ll choose to support games that are developed in consumer friendly ways, but I also accept that not everyone sees it as a big deal. If a company decides they need kernel level anti-cheat, then that’s on them. They won’t get my money, but I’m not about to start a petition to legally ban the use of kernel level anti-cheat and call anyone who won’t sign it an industry shill and bootlicker.

    Want to stop games you buy from being killed? Don’t buy games that can be. Does this mean you’ll be sitting out while all your friends have fun playing the latest hit game? Probably. Does it mean 10 years later when the game no longer works you can smugly tell them “heh, looks like you guys got scammed.” Also yes. Just don’t be surprised that they think you’re weird.


  • From the initiative:

    This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

    Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher.

    The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.

    This is all that the initiative states on the matter. How it would actually work in practice is anyone’s guess because the wording is so vague. Supporters seem to be under the impression that companies have a “server.exe” file they purposefully don’t provide players because they’re evil and hate you. They could also be contracting out matchmaking services to a third party and don’t actually do it in-house. Software development is complex and building something that will be used by 100,000 people simultaneously isn’t easy.

    There’s a reason comedic videos like Microservices, where an engineer explains why it’s impossible to show the user it is their birthday based on an overly complex network of microservices, and Fireship’s overengineering a website exist. Big software is known to be difficult to maintain and update. Huge multiplayer games aren’t any different. It’s likely there isn’t actually a “reasonable” way for them to continue to work. Supporters are hopeful this initiative would cause the industry to change how game software is developed, but that hope gets real close to outright naivety.



  • You’re not alone! I worked 12 hours in 37°C (99°F), 47% humidity yesterday. However, we get essentially unlimited breaks in an air conditioned break room, have cooling vests filled with ice packs we can wear on the floor, and are supplied with sports drinks and feeezies. Your work can’t really make the world less hot, but they can work with you to avoid development of heat related illnesses!